


Welcome Home

by oflights



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Coming of Age, M/M, Soulmates, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-19
Updated: 2013-11-19
Packaged: 2018-01-02 01:13:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 61,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1050761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oflights/pseuds/oflights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On his seventh birthday, Sidney meets 23-year-old time traveler Geno, who tells him that they will play hockey together. And then they do. Loosely based on The Time Traveler's Wife.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> *falls over* This has been in the works for MONTHS. Like literally months. Here, look at the start of it: [May 9th, 2013.](http://i.imgur.com/QFpM8Sg.png) Since I started writing this, I moved to a different country, watched 10 billion hours of HGTV, had three children, put them through college, and killed a man just to watch him die. Some of those things aren't true.
> 
> First off, PLEASE NOTE: the underage warning is NOT what it seems. There is no future!Geno/past!Sidney action, sorry. 
> 
> Secondly, and probably most importantly: this is not a straight-up AU. My God did I butcher this book. If you read it, you'll know all the rules have been smashed and bent, the plot twisted around for my own nefarious purposes. Sorry about that if you're a huge fan of the source material!
> 
> Thirdly, and lastly omg, the music. Music was just so important. [Here](http://8tracks.com/oflights/welcome-home) is the playlist I listened to while writing this monstrosity and now you can listen to it, too. The title is taken from Radical Face's Welcome Home, which is just everything to this fic. The epigraph(s) are from Dr. Seuss, of course.
> 
> Thanks, as always, to my wonderful ~~im~~ patient twitter feed for being the actual best twitter feed a girl could ask for. Thanks to the various people who read the first part of this and failed to pick up on how nuts I am, and thanks so so much to Salv for the beta. <3

 

 

**Part One**   
_1994-2004_

_Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the best.  
Wherever you go, you will top all the rest._

_Except when you don’t._   
_Because sometimes, you won’t._   


Down the road, past the bend where they set up the net in the street because the cars honk first there, there is a small gravel path that leads down to the lake.

There is an invisible line at the start of that gravel path for Sidney. Mom drew it, because she can’t see him down there from the kitchen window and neither can any of the neighbors that watch them play sometimes. Sidney promised to never go down the gravel path, linking pinkies with his mom and promising himself he’d never do it.

But sometimes Zach and Eric and Danny want to go in to the arcade instead of playing in the bend. “It’s hot, Sidney,” Zach whines, and Sidney shakes his head, sweat dripping into his eyes and making him squint.

“Is not.”

“It is _too_ ,” Eric says, and it goes around like that until Zach and Danny’s mom call for them. They are older but they are the ones that act like babies, Sidney thinks, watching their car pull away. They never ask Sidney to go to the arcade, though he says all the time he might like it, even if it can’t be as fun as hockey.

That leaves Sidney with Billy, who is the real baby on the street, just barely five and too small for all of his pads. Billy is pretty cool for a baby and he tries his best, but it’s way too easy to score on him, and sometimes he cries if he lets in easy ones. Sidney feels bad.

“I don’t wanna play anymore,” Billy says eventually, and that’s what Sidney knew would happen.

He rolls his eyes, swipes his sweaty hair out of his face, and says, “It’s okay, Billy. I’ll be goalie now.”

“No. Don’t wanna play.” He’s close to crying, and Sidney hates that, because when Billy cries he always wants to cry, too. Sometimes he does cry, and that’s terrible; he’s going to be seven years old soon, not a baby anymore, and crying is what babies do.

“Okay,” Sidney says quickly, and then, “Please don’t cry, Billy,” because Billy still looks kind of upset.

Billy sniffles, and Sidney panics and tries to hug him, but that just makes Billy run off. He trips when his knee pads slide down to his feet but pops back up real fast and disappears into his house.

Sidney shoots into the empty net for a while, frustrated and wiping his nose intermittently and saying his shot targets out loud until his voice stops being all wobbly. It’s different out here, though, than in the basement, where Dad will watch and talk to him and Mom is just upstairs, waiting with cocoa and maybe cookies. In the basement is work, and then reward. Out here is supposed to be fun, and it’s not, and that just makes Sidney’s voice wobble again.

It’ll be a long time before Dad comes home from work. They’ll eat dinner, and then Dad will have a beer and watch TV for a little while before he goes downstairs with Sidney. It’ll take forever, and sitting in the house with Mom, waiting, just sounds stupid. Sidney shoots low, tries to imagine the ball skittering through a goalie’s legs, and then sends his stick flying after it, the clatter on the ground loud and mean.

He marches toward the net, picks up his stick, but leaves the ball where it is, looking at the gravel path and its invisible line instead. Mom is cleaning out the upstairs closet today, sorting through a bunch of boring papers and boxes. It will take a long time, and probably she’ll be too busy to look out the window.

The gravel under his feet sounds crunchy and loud and it makes him feel guilty. Sidney turns back twice but on the third time tells himself to stop being a baby.

He smells the lake before he sees it, making his nose wrinkle a bit. He’s not going to swim or anything, that would be stupid, but it’s kind of cool to just look at the water for a little while, squinting in the sunlight and pitching a rock or two as far as he can. Sidney feels nervous and tingly just standing here, looking back over his shoulder at the gravel path. He can’t see the invisible line anymore, can’t even imagine it.

There is one boathouse on this patch of shoreline, right by a small, empty dock that’s all rotting wood and green algae. It’s smaller and more rundown even than the dock Dad takes Sidney to when he wants to go fishing, and the boathouse is worse. It looks like the roof might cave in, and maybe it’s haunted.

Sidney is scared to go in, but then he feels really stupid for being scared and knows he has to go in now.

He wishes he had taken Billy along, because Billy would probably be _really_ scared, and then Sidney could be brave for him. Now he has to be brave for himself, and that’s way harder.

He pushes the door open because he’s a little excited, too, because he’s scared and he has time and no one wants to play today. Sidney is alone and so this place is his, this part of the water is his and this rocky, sandy ground is his, as sure as the hockey stick he keeps clutched in his sweaty hands.

The boathouse stinks inside, like damp and plants and animal pee. The sunlight is beaming in through one of the broken windows, so it’s not dark, but there’s stuff all over: old fishing things and a bunch of pails, two lawn chairs tossed on their sides and a big rack that may have once held oars.

Sidney doesn’t touch anything at first, just looking around. He prods at one of the lawn chairs with his stick, then a pail with the tip of his sneaker, jumping when it clatters onto its side and then feeling kind of dumb.

He is alone in here, and it’s different from being alone out in the bend. It’s like when everyone else is asleep at home, and Sidney wakes up in the middle of the night because he had a bad dream. He learned quickly that it was better to just sit awake in his room and know that he could sneak around the house if he wanted to, could cry as long as he wanted to or not cry or whatever; that was better than going and waking up Mom and Dad.

“This is my place,” Sidney says out loud, and it feels awesome. “Stupid,” he says next, and he giggles and ignores feeling guilty. Mom would yell at him but Mom isn’t here.

He touches everything in the boathouse after that, with his hands and with his hockey stick. He rearranges the lawn chairs so they all face each other, so that if Sidney ever wants to bring anyone here, everyone can sit and talk. Right now he doesn’t want to bring anyone, though. Probably he never will, but just in case. He cleans up a little bit, too, lining the pails up in a row like he lines up his toys, sifting around on the floor and picking up any loose fishing hooks so he doesn’t step on them.

Sidney watches the sun climb across the sky through the window to be sure of when he needs to go back home. He’s sweaty and dusty by the time the boathouse looks a little clearer, and there is less sunlight now so he is squinting a little to see his finished work. Sidney looks around with his hands on his hips and nods, feeling a little silly but a lot grown up, too. Billy could never have done this much work so fast, and probably not Danny or Eric or Zach, either.

Only the threat of being caught and unable to come back to the boathouse gets Sidney back on the gravel path home. He stops in the bend to pick up the ball and hook his shoulder into the corner of the net, dragging it slowly back to the garage. He is smiling widely.

He is still smiling when Mom sees him, and she snorts out loud and shakes her head. “Sidney! Look at you, were you rolling around in a ditch out there?”

Sidney tries to stop smiling; this will be the first time he can ever remember telling his mom a lie, and he wants it to work. He can’t help giggling when he says, “ _No_ ,” but it must work okay, because Mom just laughs and ruffles his hair. She hugs him, too, even though he leaves dusty handprints on the front of her pants.

“Go wash up for dinner,” Mom tells him, shaking her head again. “No, go take a _bath_ before dinner, your father will be home any minute.”

“Okay,” Sidney says agreeably, because he figures a bath is the least he can do, considering what he’s hiding from her.

He starts fading a little during dinner, drooping into his spaghetti and trying not to yawn too obviously, hiding his mouth behind his glass of apple juice. Dad winks at him, though, and pushes away his own plate before it’s totally empty. He drains his beer, lopes into the kitchen for another one, and comes around the table to put his hand on Sidney’s shoulder.

“Wanna get straight downstairs, bud?”

“He’s not finished eating, Troy—” Mom starts, but Sidney’s yelped, “Yeah!” cuts her off, and he bounces out of his seat quickly, a well of energy springing up in him. “Wait,” Mom says before he can run off, voice loud and firm, and she gestures for him to stop by her chair so she can wipe at his mouth and hands, kissing his forehead briefly. “Not too long, he’s tired,” she says, smiling at Sidney when he insists, “Am _not_.”

He’s not sure how long it is before he starts yawning again, listing to the side and leaning on his stick a little before he can force himself to dig the pucks back out of the dryer whenever he runs out. There are new dents but not that many, and Dad is happy with him, calling up to Mom and asking if she’d put magic in the spaghetti, because something’s making Sidney great tonight.

Sidney’s too tired to hide his yawns after a while, but it’s still a little jarring when Dad scoops him up and pries his stick out of his hands, putting it down on top of the dryer and starting up the stairs. Sidney dozes with his face buried in Dad’s neck, but when they pass by the kitchen without stopping, he makes a noise and reaches out to where Mom usually is with his cookies. He’s pretty sure he’s earned cookies.

“But—” he says sleepily, and Dad shushes him, cupping the back of his head gently.

“Tomorrow night. We’ll double the cookie order to make up for it, okay? You’re beat.”

“M’not tired,” Sidney mumbles, and Dad’s laugh is low and warm and rumbling.

“Sure you’re not, Sid.”

It’s still a little unsettling, though the rest of bedtime goes the usual way. Dad helps him into his pajamas, asks him if he needs the nightlight and puts it on even though Sidney says no. He tells him goodnight and tells him he did a good job, and before he falls asleep all the way, Mom comes in and says the same thing, brushing his hair back from his face and leaving the door cracked open.

It’s all the same but Sidney doesn’t like skipping steps, and he wonders if the boathouse is what messed him up. He wonders if it’ll mess more up, if tomorrow Dad won’t ask about magic spaghetti or magic tuna, they usually have tuna on Thursday nights.

But when Sidney actually falls asleep, he dreams the boathouse is magic, his place and magic just for him, and he forgets to worry about it in the morning, when everything is normal and goes the same as always.

 

Sidney doesn’t get to go to the boathouse a lot. A lot of the time, Eric and Danny and Zach and Billy like to play with him, and he’s not going to show them yet, maybe not ever if he doesn’t want to.

Sometimes he has to go down to the other side of the lake with them to swim, because Zach and Danny’s mom wants to take them. He doesn’t know why no one wants to swim on his side of the lake but he’s glad; he likes it for himself and he thinks about it freezing over in the winter with a thrilled, excited tingle in his stomach.

But winter is forever away and summer stretches long. There are swimming days and hockey days and then arcade days, and those are the days Sidney goes to the boathouse. He doesn’t do much there, but he brings some pucks and his stick and imagines the big rack for the oars is the dryer, working on shooting until he gets tired.

Then he goes to the edge of the lake and splashes water on his face, and sits in the sun to dry off before he goes home. He goes home every time waiting for Mom to scold him for going out of her sight, but she never does, and he is happy and a little confused.

On the weekends, Dad takes Sidney to the rink in town, and the boathouse magic is still working, because Dad keeps getting excited about his shot. “Skating’s getting better, too,” Dad says, and he talks about how much better Sidney will be than the other kids when he starts playing on a team again. Sidney’s not sure if he’s going to like that, because if he’s that much better, he’s not sure the other kids will want to play with him. But he doesn’t say that to Dad; he looks too happy.

His real seventh birthday is on a Sunday, but Dad can only get the rink rented for Saturday. It’s okay, though, because all of the boys from the block come, and a few kids he knows from school. Some of them can’t skate, and none of them can skate as well as Sidney, but it’s fun anyway, because there’s pizza and cake and pop and some of the older boys start a hockey game, like what he’ll play again in the fall. So it’s great.

For his real birthday, Mom makes him Mickey Mouse pancakes and he gets to open his presents at the kitchen table. Dad has to fix something in the basement and he asks Sidney if he wants to help, but Mom kisses his forehead and tells him he can do anything he wants today.

It’s easy to lie now; Sidney wonders if that’s because he’s seven instead of six. “I want to go play in the bend with Billy and Zach.”

“Okay,” Mom says, and that sounds easy too. She looks out the window and clucks a bit. “Come in if it rains, though.”

“Okay.”

He sets up the net, leaves the ball resting in the bottom corner, and then slings his stick over his shoulder to head for the boathouse. The sky is rumbly and gray and Sidney thinks he won’t have much time, but he’s also thinking of his Dad’s face lighting up yesterday when he scored on a 12-year-old goalie, and he wants the boathouse magic, if only a little bit.

The pockets of his shorts are stuffed with as many pucks as they can hold, and the water looks like metal when he passes it, choppy and moving. He hurries into the boathouse, the door clattering open in front of him, and then freezes when there is another loud noise that has nothing to do with the door.

It came from behind the rack Sidney shoots at, and Sidney holds his stick out in front of him, his heart pounding. There is not much light because of the cloudy sky, but Sidney can see the shadow of something moving, almost as tall as the rack.

In a few seconds, Sidney’s eyes adjust and he sees that there is a face there, attached to a neck and shoulders, peeking out from behind the rack. The face belongs to a man and has wide, frightened eyes and bright red cheeks.

Sidney stares at the man, still frozen. His brain is telling him to run but his legs are stuck, and they stay stuck even when the man takes a cautious step to the side, still half behind the rack, but enough to show that he’s not wearing a shirt.

“Hello,” the man says. His voice is thick and has an accent, like French but way different than French, and Sidney keeps staring. His hockey stick, still held out in front of him, is shaking. “Sorry if scare you. This your house?”

Sidney thinks _yes_ because this is his boathouse, the source of new hockey magic and not something he wants to give up or share yet. But the man is very big, he sounds like no one Sidney has ever heard before, and they are alone. Sidney should run.

“Sorry,” the man says, and he is squinting at Sidney, frowning a little. They stand there staring at each other for a little while longer, and Sidney should run but doesn’t. Then the man says, very carefully, “Sid?” and Sidney stumbles backwards.

“What,” he says, but the real question is, “How?” which he stutters out after. The man’s face goes soft and he moves as if to take a step forward, then frowns and stops abruptly. He looks around a little, spots the tarp that Sidney had been planning to try and make a tent out of just to prove he could, and grabs it. That’s when Sidney sees that the man is totally naked.

Sidney yelps, “Whoa!” and stumbles back more, tripping on the leg of one of the lawn chairs and falling down. He barely notices the pain that shoots up from his butt as he tries to scramble to his feet again and hold on to his hockey stick, but the man’s eyes are wide and concerned as he steps forward, the tarp wrapped around him like a towel now and dragging across the floor.

“Is okay, Sid, sorry, not mean to scare—”

“How do you know my name?” Sidney asks, his voice sounding high and shaky and very loud in the boathouse. He stands up again, holding up his stick, and glares as hard as he can at the man. “And why are you _naked_? It’s going to rain, you know. You’ll catch a cold.”

The man smiles a little, clutching the tarp tightly around him. “Sorry. I leave my clothes home.”

“ _Why_?”

“Long story. Complicated, maybe—can you tell me something first?”

“No,” Sidney says, and he brandishes his hockey stick like a sword. He’s taken enough of these to the face already to know that he can definitely hurt the man if he needs to. That makes him a little less terrified, enough that he still hasn’t bolted outside yet. “Tell me how you know my name first. I asked first, you have to tell.”

The man looks at him, thoughtful and still smiling. “Can tell my name first.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. My name is Geno.”

Sidney swallows hard. “Okay. Geno. Now—now where did you come from and how do you know my name?”

“Can ask one more thing first?”

“ _What_?” Sidney snaps, and Geno’s smile goes wider, like he wants to laugh.

“What is date?”

“August seventh,” Sidney says slowly, and when Geno just waits patiently, his smile growing, Sidney thinks about it and adds, “The year too? It’s 1994.”

“Thank you,” Geno says, and it’s habit to automatically reply, “You’re welcome,” even though it makes Geno finally laugh at him a little.

“Tell me now,” Sidney says. He waves the hockey stick a little, not really threatening—he doesn’t want to hit Geno in the face anymore, but he wants it known that he will if he has to. That makes Geno laugh again, the sound bright and big, like Dad laughs when he watches TV.

“Okay,” Geno says when he finishes laughing. “I come from very far away, and—and long time away.”

“Long time?” Sidney echoes. Geno nods patiently.

“Yes. Long time. And.” Here Geno stops, looking thoughtful again, staring at Sidney carefully. He takes a big breath before he says, slowly and clearly, “Where I come from, you and me play hockey together, in NHL.”

Sidney doesn’t mean to drop his hockey stick, and the sound makes him jump when it hits the floor of the boathouse. But he stares at Geno with his mouth open for a while before he can force out more words, breathless and quiet. “You—the NHL? _I_ play in the NHL?” He feels himself starting to shake. “You play _hockey_?”

Geno nods, and Sidney feels something warm and excited start bursting inside him, his stomach tingly and fluttery. “But—I don’t get it.”

“I try to explain,” Geno says, and Sidney is still scared, but he listens. The clouds rumble outside and Sidney is dimly aware that he is still on a time limit, but he wants to listen, and in that moment, it feels like nothing can stop him.

 

 

At dinner, Sidney asks Dad, “Can people go to different places in time, like when we drive to go see Grandma and Grandpa, but before? Like last year, or next summer?”

Dad chews for a while, looking over at Mom, whose eyes are narrowed a little bit. “Why do you ask?” Dad says eventually, and Mom clears her throat.

“Did something happen?” she asks, in a tone that immediately has Sidney looking down at his food. Geno said not to tell Mom and Dad that they met, because then it’ll be harder to meet again, and Gen says they’re going to meet again before they play hockey together, _in the NHL_.

“Danny was talking about it,” Sidney says, hating how the lie feels in his mouth. “Is it true?”

“Sid,” Mom says, his voice going hard. “Are you sure nothing—did you go somewhere?”

“No!” He hopes he’s not sweating, though he feels kind of sweaty. He makes his eyes as wide as they can go, until his forehead hurts a little.

“Trina, cool it. It would’ve happened by now if it was going to, don’t—”

“That’s not true, they don’t know the exact age, they don’t know a lot of things and we can’t just assume—”

“ _Dad_ ,” Sidney says, drawing it out loudly until Dad sighs and Mom presses her lips together unhappily. He feels guilty, he thinks he’ll always feel a little guilty for telling lies, but Geno had called it a secret, not a lie. He likes the way that sounds better than lie. Secrets are for big kids and grownups; lies are for bad people.

“The answer is yes, Sid,” Dad says eventually, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “Some people can do it. Not a lot of people, though, and it’s not—it’s something you’re born with. Like how you were born with brown hair, other people are born with the ability to go to places like next summer.”

“It’s very dangerous,” Mom adds. Sidney nods seriously. Geno said he doesn’t know where he’s going to go or when, and sometimes he goes to places where he could get hurt, or meet bad people. “Glad I meet you, Sid,” he had said, and Sidney smiled at him for the first time.

“Okay. Thanks.” He goes back to his food, even though he’s basically buzzing with questions. He thinks maybe he’ll try writing them down later, so he remembers to ask Geno if or when they ever meet again.

He has _so much_ he wants to ask Geno; they had barely talked, really. Lightning had cracked through the sky, then thunder, long and rolling across the water, and Sidney jumped. He looked across the boathouse and Geno looked pained. “What?” he asked, and then, “It’s just thunder. I’m not scared. Are you scared?”

Geno kept looking pained. “Going now,” he said, a little sad, and Sidney frowned at him.

“But you just got here! It’s okay, I’ll protect you from the thunder, you don’t have to be scared.”

Geno smiled then, and kind of hugged himself. Then he said, “Bye, Sid. Happy birthday.”

Sidney blinked and he was gone.

He doesn’t ask any more questions at the dinner table. He gets another cake, a smaller one that Mom baked, and his parents sing to him. Everything else is the same, though, taking shots with Dad in the basement and hot cocoa when he gets back upstairs, and it’s a great real birthday.

After Dad leaves Sidney in bed with the door cracked, Sidney uses the light from his nightlight and the sole pencil he’d managed to keep from school to painstakingly write out some questions. He writes until his hand hurts and his eyes keep closing, so even though the nightlight is on it’s still hard to see the words.

It’s raining in the morning, and the day after that, so Sidney keeps at it, filling three whole pages of his old math notebook. “What’re you writing, Sid?” Mom asks him once, cupping the back of his neck as she passes through the den.

Sidney can’t think of a lie, so he goes with almost the truth. “Just some questions.”

“For who?”

“My friend,” Sidney says, and Mom looks at the notebook, chuckles a little, and swats him lightly on the head.

“Well, keep going, your handwriting’s starting to look better. We’ll have a talk about your spelling later.”

“Thanks!” Sidney beams up at Mom until she looks even happier at him and continues into the kitchen.

When the rain stops, the boys on the street want to play, and there are days where he has to go with Mom into town for school clothes and a haircut as September lurks on the edges of their minds. When Sidney does get back to the boathouse, his notebook clutched in sweaty hands and the clothes Dad keeps in the garage for when he goes fishing bundled up under his arm, it is empty.

It’s empty for days after, though Sidney leaves the notebook and the clothes and a note on bright yellow construction paper: _Hello Geno._ All of this stuff is still there every time he goes back, and Sidney kind of feels like he felt last Christmas, when Mom made oatmeal cookies and said he should leave those out for Santa, and of course Santa didn’t eat them because oatmeal cookies are the worst. Sidney considers himself lucky he even got any presents, and he hopes Mom has learned her lesson about the oatmeal cookies.

Sidney keeps going back, not bothering to tell himself it’s for the hockey magic anymore but for the Geno magic, definitely. Maybe it’s kind of the same thing; most of the questions Sidney has written down in the notebook have to do with hockey, and he thinks Geno can teach him things that no one else can, not even Dad.

He has to start getting ready for hockey, and as school draws nearer he feels like he’s going to have less and less chances to try and catch Geno. He wonders if Geno is there on the days Sidney can’t make it, if he’s mad at Sidney for not being there, and even though they have only just met, Sidney doesn’t want to make Geno mad. He has too many questions for that.

Three days before school, though, Sidney returns to the boathouse and Geno is in there. The fishing clothes are big on him and make him look kind of funny. He is sitting in one of the lawn chairs and flipping through Sidney’s notebook. Sidney can’t help the excited, nervous giggle that escapes him when he first sees him.

“You’re back!” he says when Geno grins at him.

“Yes, tell you I come back.”

“I was waiting for you,” Sidney says.

Geno stops grinning abruptly and drops the notebook. He scrambles to pick it up, looking at Sidney with wide eyes and very seriously telling him, “Sorry, Sid.”

“It’s okay, those are just my questions so I don’t forget. I have lots to ask you.”

“Don’t know how much I can tell you, though. Complicated.” He looks down at the notebook. “Lots of words, don’t know them all.”

“Because you talk funny?” Sidney asks; that had been one of the questions, the accent. Geno nods at him.

“Yes. I am from Russia, have to learn English when I come to U.S. to play hockey.”

“With me.” Sidney drops into another lawn chair hard, mostly to keep from bouncing around the boathouse like he kind of wants to. “To play hockey with _me_ , right? We play in the U.S.?”

Geno closes his eyes and chuckles softly, shaking his head. “Yes. See, already I say things I should not. Not gonna tell you what team, is cheating.”

“How is that cheating?” Sidney demands, but Geno just keeps shaking his head. “Fine, don’t tell me.” He folds his arms across his chest and sits back in the lawn chair. He wants to ask for his notebook so he can remember the rest of the questions, but also doesn’t want to talk to Geno right at this very second.

Geno waits him out, though, smiling again, until Sidney huffs and says, “Okay, but you _have_ to tell me some things, otherwise it’s not fair. Why are you even here if you’re not gonna tell me stuff?”

“Don’t know why I’m here,” Geno says, shrugging. “I just come here. Can’t control it, just happen, except—” He stops, and Sidney leans forward in his seat, staring raptly.

“Except what?”

“Except on ice,” Geno tells him. His voice is kind of thick and he’s not looking at Sidney all the way. Sidney thinks about that for a while, shuddering at first to picture Geno just disappearing in the middle of a game on the ice. Sidney never wants to leave the ice when he’s on it; he can’t imagine being forced to by time travel magic.

“Good,” Sidney says eventually, nodding firmly. “If you’re a hockey player, and you’re on my team, then you should always get to stay on the ice if you want to. That’s where you belong.” He eyes his notebook while Geno’s face changes again, staring at Sidney this time until Sidney’s kind of uncomfortable. “Can I have my notebook?”

There is a long quiet time where Sidney still feels uncomfortable, until Geno carefully passes the notebook over. “Cannot answer everything,” he says again, but Sidney ignores him to rifle past his math to the list of questions.

He starts at the very top of the list, the most important. “Do we win the Stanley Cup?”

“Can’t say,” Geno says, and when Sidney looks up to scowl at him, he mimes zipping up his lips.

“But how is that _cheating_?” Sidney yells. Geno just stares at him with blank eyes, his mouth twitching when Sidney starts glaring at him again. “Ugh. Fine. Are you really, really old?”

Geno laughs for a few moments, clutching his stomach over the baggy plaid shirt he’s wearing. “No. Not that old.”

“How old are you?”

“I am 23,” Geno says, still laughing a little. Sidney rolls his eyes.

“That’s _old_ , Geno.”

“Yes, maybe to kid who is seven. Still just a baby, everyone is old to you.”

“I’m not a baby!”

“Sorry,” Geno says hastily, but he doesn’t look sorry. He looks like he might still be laughing but keeping it inside now. “English words hard for me.”

Sidney peers at him suspiciously, but he doesn’t know anything about Russia and their words, so he can’t be sure Geno’s lying to him. And if Geno is really his teammate, then Sidney has to trust him.

“You help me,” Geno adds, raising his eyebrow. “I learn English so well from you.”

Sidney wrinkles his nose, even though he feels a flush of pride well up in him, too. “Well, I don’t think I’ve done a really good job, you talk _really_ funny.” He huffs as Geno starts laughing again, practically doubling over, and he laughs for a really long time.

When Geno finally stops laughing, Sidney starts going through his list of questions again, trying to find ones that Geno might answer. “Am I a good hockey player?”

“The best,” Geno says immediately, and Sidney wants to roll his eyes again, because Dad says stuff like that all the time. But Geno looks really serious, so Sidney just nods slowly.

“Okay. What about you? Are you any good?”

“I am good.” Geno grins again, huge. “Not as good as you.”

“Are you _sure_?”

“Promise.”

He has a feeling Geno’s only being a little truthful about that, but it’s enough of an answer, so he puts a checkmark next to the question and looks at the next one. “Where you come from, what year is it?”

Geno thinks about that for a minute, frowning thoughtfully, before he shrugs again. “2009.”

Sidney tries to count on his fingers but loses it counting on his second hand, and he frowns at Geno until he gets it and helpfully supplies, “You just turn 22 where I come from,” with a small smile.

Sidney drops back in his chair again, letting that sink in. “Wow. That’s a long time away.”

Geno nods, looking solemn. “Yes. Very far for you to go, and me too.” He reaches out a little, palm up. “Can I have notebook? Have something for you from Sid who is 22.”

“Really? Like a message?” Sidney asks excitedly, shoving the notebook over and the pencil with it so fast he nearly stabs Geno’s hand. He leans back again, sheepish, but Geno is just nodding and flipping through to an empty page in the back.

“Yes. Take very long time to memorize, but here.” Slowly and carefully, Geno writes all down a page, his brow furrowed in concentration. Sidney watches him with his breath kind of held, but when Geno pushes the notebook back at him, he feels a dull swoop of disappointment. The page is simply littered with numbers.

“I don’t get it.”

“Dates,” Geno says. “These are days I visit you, Sid.”

Sidney looks at the numbers again closely and gasps; ten of his birthdays are there, and other dates, too, though never more than two in one year that he notices. He runs his fingers down the numbers, because suddenly they are very important, even though he still doesn’t quite understand why. He decides to ask. “Why do you visit me so much?”

“Don’t know,” Geno tells him. “But happy to visit you than other people, maybe bad people.”

Suddenly there is nothing worse that Sidney can imagine than Geno seeing bad people that hurt him just because he’s magic and he’s naked. It makes Sidney feel angry and a little scared, but the kind of scared that makes him determined to be brave. “Can you just visit me all the time? I don’t mind if you want to, you’re nice and you can tell me about hockey.”

“Can’t,” Geno says. His voice is thick again. “Would if I could, though.”

“Maybe someday you can,” Sidney says, and though Geno shakes his head, suddenly the answer is clear to Sidney. Geno visits Sidney because Sidney will never hurt him. Geno and Sidney are going to play hockey together someday, and Geno can’t travel when he’s on the ice. That means he can’t travel when he’s with Sidney. “Maybe someday you’ll just be with me all the time, and you’ll never have to leave.”

He doesn’t think he’s ever heard someone sound as sad as Geno does when he says, “Maybe.”

 

The next time Sidney sees Geno, it is his eighth birthday. He has given his first ever newspaper interview, he has played more good hockey than he has ever played at one time in his life, and Mom and Dad have just told him that he will have a baby brother or sister sometime in the spring.

This is not what he opens with when he first sees Geno, though he is still buzzing with the news as he waits in the boathouse for him. Sidney’s birthday has been circled on his calendar for a while now with a tiny _G_ written in the corner of the box, and he only has a small stretch of time after breakfast to see Geno, but it is comforting to know that he will.

So Sidney waits, and it is not very long before Geno appears, naked and already reaching for the clothes that Sidney keeps stored there, the shirt stained a little pink from his attempt to sneakily wash it and get the fishy smell out for Geno.

Sidney covers his eyes politely while Geno dresses and, when he peeks and sees Geno just smiling broadly at him, his words tumble out of him quickly, rushed and breathless. “Hi Geno. Are we still playing hockey together?”

Geno’s smile gets even broader, practically splitting his face in half. “Hi Sid. Happy birthday. Yes, we still play together. Is offseason now, though, I come from Russia.”

“Really?” Sidney asks, scrunching his face up to picture that. He had looked up Russia in a library book at school, and seen a lot of snowy pictures and cool, colorful palaces, but not very much info. He can’t even imagine a place so far away. “What’s Russia like?”

Geno talks about Russia the same way he talks about hockey, with the same softness and affection in his face. He talks about long winters and his small city with inexplicable fondness; Sidney only likes winter for one thing, but Geno’s love seems to go way beyond that.

He talks mostly about the people there, and how close families are. Sometimes, he says, it is hard because everyone knows everyone’s business, but people respect each other and love each other and if they butt in, it is because they care. “Is home,” Geno says simply after a while, and Sidney thinks of the warmth he feels whenever he turns on to their block and sees the bend or the lake or their house after they’ve been at Grandma’s for a weekend, and he starts to get it.

“Will you tell me about where we play?” Sidney asks, and Geno’s look goes kind of sour, though still amused.

“You know I not—”

“You don’t have to tell me where, but.” Sidney thinks hard. “Is that home too?”

Geno’s face softens again. His eyes look far away. But his nod is firm when he says, “Yes. Take a while, but—yes, is like home for me, too. Team is like home.”

Sidney has never heard something so wonderful in his life.

It is a while before Geno asks him, “What is new for life for you?” and another little bit before Sidney can rearrange the words and get what he’s asking. He thinks about it and talks about hockey for a while, about his interview and how Dad had gotten kicked out of the rink in Dartmouth for fighting with another dad that called Sidney something he’s not supposed to repeat.

“But it was only a warning,” Sidney says reassuringly, because Geno’s face has gone kind of dark and pinched, worried probably like Sidney had been that Dad couldn’t watch any more games there. “He’s allowed back in this year, promise.”

“Good,” Geno says shortly, and he shakes his head a little, fitting on a softer expression. “Nothing else?”

Sidney thinks again, and then remembers. “Oh! Yeah, I’m getting a little brother or sister soon. Mom’s going to have a baby.” He narrows his eyes when Geno just hums a little, eyes bright. “Hey. You knew about that, didn’t you?”

Geno shrugs, maybe guilty. “Yes, know younger Crosby.”

“Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl? Is it nice? Does it like hockey too?” He knows as soon as the questions tumble out of him that they’re useless, but Geno shakes his head again anyway to confirm.

“Not gonna tell, Sid. Take all the fun out, ruin surprise.”

“But I don’t want to have a surprise! Mom already said the baby was a surprise. Sometimes there are too many surprises.” Dad said something like that, once. But Geno is stubborn; he might be the most stubborn person Sidney has ever met. “Okay, but does the baby like me? Can you tell me that, please?”

“Yes,” Geno says fiercely. “Baby love you. You are best big brother, promise.”

“Really?” Sidney doesn’t say that he’s kind of worried the baby won’t like him, or that it will get mad at him like Danny does sometimes when Sidney talks too much. He’s also worried that maybe Mom and Dad will like the baby better than him, or love him a little less now that they have to love more than just one kid. Those are the kinds of things you don’t talk about, even with your teammates, even if they’re magic and from the future.

“Really. Promise.”

Geno holds out his fist, and Sidney stares at it until Geno gently takes Sidney’s hand with his other one and folds it into a fist like his. He bumps them together a few times, like a handshake but way cooler, and as soon as he pulls back, Sidney shouts, “Again! I’ll be better at it this time!”

“Can always use more practice,” Geno says solemnly, bumping Sidney’s fist again. His hand makes Sidney’s look so small, but he’s patient if Sidney gets it wrong or isn’t fast enough, and he doesn’t treat Sidney like a baby.

Geno never treats Sidney like a baby, not any time he visits: after Taylor is born, and after the lake freezes over and Sidney is caught and punished for trying to skate on it alone. After Billy follows him to the boathouse and pinky swears to never tell about it, and after Dad gets banned from two different rinks for yelling too much at people that are mean. Sidney doesn’t tell Geno about the mean people much because he gets upset like Dad does, and Geno is never with Sidney for too long. He doesn’t want to waste time upsetting him.

Every time Sidney sees Geno, when he is nine and ten and eleven and twelve, when he is thirteen and contemplating leaving home because they are running out of rinks to ban his father from, he asks him the same question: “Are we still playing hockey together?”

The answer is always yes, and it makes every visit perfect.

Geno starts answering more questions eventually. Nothing specific about the future, no matter how much Sidney asks, but he answers questions about himself instead. He writes down his full name for Sidney in both English and Cyrillic, and Sidney practices the characters until his fingers are cramped up and they look a little less like an alien language.

“Are you an alien?” Sidney asks, and he waits patiently for Geno to stop laughing.

“No,” Geno says eventually. “I am human. Some humans just go different times like this, just the way they are.”

His parents had told him that much, but Sidney looks into it on his own, at the school library and then at the library in town when he doesn’t find many resources. There is still not that much out there, and he secretly plans to look next time he’s in Halifax. But he does find a few things: numbers and facts about genes, and Geno answers some questions for him when the books form them.

“I am different,” Geno says. “Even for time travel. Lots of people, they go to past, future—last winter and next summer and 20 years later in fall. But I am different. I only go to past.”

“So you don’t know anything about the future?” Sidney asks, baffled. Geno nods.

“Yes.” He smiles at Sidney. “I only know about your future.”

“Yeah, and you won’t tell me _anything_ ,” Sidney complains, but it’s more to think about, and he writes it down in his Geno notebook, worn and crumbly like the fishing clothes Geno still shrugs on every time, like the boathouse, which now leans slightly to the left and sags during every rainstorm. He likes to look at all the dates still written down except for the last one, only four years away, making his stomach squirm with unhappiness.

There is an incident that makes the research wholly necessary, and it happens on a chilly day in November when Sidney is 14. He is waiting for Geno in the boathouse with a thick blanket, pilfered from a pile of old linens in the basement, and he has hockey practice in just a few hours, so he is antsy about waiting. He’s relieved when there is a thump behind the rack, signaling Geno’s arrival, but the relief quickly goes away when Geno stays there, barely moving.

Sidney waits, confused, until he hears a soft groan. He leaps to his feet and moves the rack out of the way, ignoring the way he still involuntarily blushes when he glances down at Geno naked, and looks pointedly at the rest of him until he catches sight of his knee. He gasps and drops to the floor to kneel next to Geno, whose face is twisted up in pain.

“What _happened_?” Sidney asks, using shaking hands to throw the blanket over Geno and cover up his knee, which is angry and red and swollen, bruised in places from a quick glance. “Did someone do this to you? Did you meet a bad person traveling somewhere else?”

“No,” Geno says; he is breathing harshly, air coming out in hisses through his gritted teeth. It is freezing in the boathouse but there is sweat beading along his hairline, making his hair stick to his forehead. “Just—hockey injured. Have surgery a few days ago, will fix, but—” He groans again and squeezes his eyes shut. “Supposed to have brace on knee, and not move. Not think of travel.”

Sidney feels abruptly horrified, and a little furious. “But—can’t you do something? You should’ve stopped yourself somehow!”

“Can’t stop self,” Geno says, and yes, Sidney knows that, from both Geno and his parents and various library sources. “Just happen, Sid, you know.”

“I know, but—” In his mind, in the future, Sidney’s older self can stop Geno from traveling unless he wants to, and he always wants to go back and visit Sidney. He doesn’t like to imagine the traveling as something dangerous and wrong, because it’s a part of who Geno is, and Sidney thinks about him enough already; he doesn’t need to start worrying about him too.

“Will be okay,” Geno assures him, but he looks like he’s about to pass out from pain. “Don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared,” Sidney says automatically, but he’s lying. Now he’s thinking about Geno injured and traveling somewhere else, somewhere in the past that is not as kind to Geno as Sidney is, and it’s still the worst thing he can imagine. He shudders a little and clutches his jacket tighter around him to show that it’s from the cold, and he tucks the blanket around Geno for good measure, deciding to focus on the problem at hand. “What can I do? Can I help you?”

“Just—” Geno says, and he pauses to breathe. “Just talk. Distract. Tell about life.”

“Okay,” Sidney says. “I can do that. Uh. I got four points against Bedford the other night, their goalie was terrible, but we still lost because Billy is way worse.”

“Billy,” Geno repeats faintly, like he wants to prove he’s listening. Sidney nods frantically and, after a moment’s thought, takes Geno’s hand in both of his. It is still comically larger than his, but Sidney likes to look at Geno’s hands and imagine a future where that’s not true anymore. He likes to think that that future isn’t very far away.

“Right, Billy. Billy’s my friend.” Sidney thinks for a bit. “He’s my best friend, and he tries really hard.”

“Yes. Friend of Sid, have to try hard.” Sidney flushes, but Geno sounds affectionate, and he squeezes his hand tightly around Sidney’s. Sidney can still feel it trembling faintly, though. “Four points? Tell.”

“A wrist shot, low,” Sidney says immediately, feeling some kind of relief. “I caught Bedford’s guy cheating to his glove side way too early, it was easy as anything. I got to spring Andy on a breakaway—it’s like Bedford’s never seen a stretch pass before—”

“Maybe they don’t,” Geno says laboriously, a little chiding. Sidney turns that over in his head and flushes a bit, because Geno’s right, and Sidney still lost. He should remember that.

“They were great in the neutral zone, though. And they have this guy—” Sidney grimaces and pulls one of his hands away from Geno’s, keeping one wrapped firmly around Geno’s fingers. He pushes on the tender spot on his lower ribcage, reminding himself of one of Bedford’s meatier checking lines, which had assured that any time Sidney wasn’t spent scoring or trying to get the puck up the ice, he was pinned in the corners or getting knocked on his butt. “Dad says I really need to get stronger on my feet, lower my center of gravity. We’re gonna work on it this weekend.”

“Work a lot,” Geno says, and Sidney rolls his eyes, because it is not the first time Geno has said something like that to him.

“Well, yeah. Hockey’s a lot of work. You know that.” Sidney narrows his eyes but stays smiling, and he feels triumphant when Geno manages to focus on him, eyes still a little far away but clear, too. “Maybe it’s different in Russia?”

“Yes.” Geno swallows hard, and is quiet long enough that Sidney starts to feel guilty, is arranging his apology in his head. “Different, but not Russia. Different because—when I young, people say I can’t play.”

“ _Why_?” Sidney demands, completely horrified. Geno looks up at him, kind of flat, and gives Sidney a while to think about it. He considers the position they’re in right now, the pain Geno’s in and why, and winces again. “Oh, right. But you said—”

“Yes, never travel on ice. But—” Geno frowns deeply, thoughtful. “Not know that until I older. I keep sneak out to play, and every time I play I stay safe, in present. Was a while until we figure out hockey keep me, and long time before we tell someone else hockey keep me.”

“But you did tell them, otherwise we’d never play together.” Sidney glances worriedly down at Geno’s knee. “Hey, we’re still playing hockey together, right? I mean, not now obviously, because of your knee, but—” He breaks off as he thinks about what Geno’s injury actually means: he’s not playing hockey, and so he’s probably traveling more. And that’s _awful._

It takes a while for Geno to answer him, like maybe he’s thinking about that too. “Yes,” Geno says eventually. “We still play together. Knee get better.”

“Yeah, it will,” Sidney says confidently. He squeezes Geno’s hand, like Geno had done to him. “Okay, I have other stuff to tell you. Taylor keeps calling me Squid because she heard Tommy from my baseball team call me that. She won’t stop and it’s really annoying.”

Sidney keeps talking. He doesn’t know if time is moving weird because Geno’s hurt, or if it just feels that way, but he looks at his watch after a while and cringes because practice is really soon. He doesn’t say anything, but Geno says, “Sid?” when he catches him looking again, and Sidney sighs. He’s never lied to Geno.

“I have practice soon.”

“Can go,” Geno says immediately. Sidney knows him well enough now to know that was coming, but he is still holding Geno’s hand, and he doesn’t plan on letting go.

“I’ve never been late before,” Sidney says, and when Geno starts to tug his hand away, Sidney clamps on. “I mean—I can be late once. I don’t want to leave you here.” When Geno stays quiet for a few minutes, Sidney adds, “It’s okay, Geno. I can wait for you.”

Geno says something but it’s not in English; it sounds rough and sad and Sidney doesn’t like it. He frowns, but Geno never repeats it in English, just takes a deep breath and says, “When I get home, gonna call you Squid all the time.”

“Geno!”

“Too bad,” Geno says. His voice breaks a little, but Sidney decides to ignore it.

“Not in front of the team, come on.”

“Maybe,” Geno tells him.

Dad is furious when Sidney gets back eventually, jogging back from the boathouse where Geno had disappeared from under the blanket, his hand slipping from Sidney’s like fog. He is pacing around with his car keys and Sidney’s gear bag is already loaded into the car; Sidney catches his breath and starts with, “I’m really sorry—”

“Get in the car,” Dad says shortly, and the entire ride to practice is spent listening to a lecture about responsibility and punctuality and respect for his team. Sidney listens and braces himself, but it comes as an afterthought, Dad spitting out, “And where were you, anyway?” like it doesn’t even really matter.

Sidney is too shaken to lie well, so he just says, “I was—I have this friend and we—” and Dad mercifully cuts him short to start ranting again. Sidney sinks low in his seat and tries not to look relieved.

That night, though, Dad knocks on his bedroom door after Sidney has brushed his teeth and turned down his covers, eager to climb into bed but not eager for a night of worrying about Geno continuing to travel while injured. He’s scratched out a time slot to visit the library in Halifax to do more reading; it won’t be long, but it could be enough, if he works hard.

“Hey,” Dad says, and Sidney says, “Hey,” back and gets into bed. Dad sits down at the foot of the bed and rubs the back of his neck, looking oddly sheepish, and Sidney just waits, knowing whatever he wants to say will come out eventually, in a rant or otherwise.

“About today,” Dad says. Sidney hastens with another apology before he can stop himself, not that he would, but Dad curtails another one by holding up his hand. “Relax, I’m not—I freaked out, your mother’s right. I shouldn’t—you were barely ten minutes late. I know you won’t make a habit of it, you’re a better kid than that, and I’m—I won’t freak out like that again.”

Sidney shrugs. His dad freaking out over small things is not exactly anything new; he’s seen bigger freakouts happen over dented fenders or the wrong kind of fruit in his cereal. Sidney tries to never be the cause of one, but he knows that the turnaround time for getting over freakouts is always relatively low when it involves him, too, so he’s not going to hold it against Dad. He _was_ late, after all.

“I wanted to ask you,” Dad continues, and now he just looks uncomfortable. “I was wondering—were you with a girl?”

“ _What_?” Sidney yelps, feeling himself go hot and red.

Dad holds his hands up quickly. “It’s okay if you were. It’s fine, totally fine. I just wanted to—you can talk to me about that, if you want to. I’m here. And maybe we should—should we talk about some other—”

“No!” Sidney says, his heart pounding with some kind of hysteria he can’t really place. “ _No_ , I wasn’t—Dad, ew!”

“You’re a teenager, Sid, you know this stuff is—it’s gonna start coming up and I probably should’ve had this talk with you earlier—”

“I wasn’t with a girl,” Sidney says as firmly and clearly as he can, though his throat feels kind of itchy and tight, so it’s hard. “I wasn’t—I was with Billy and I just lost track of time. That’s all. We don’t have to talk about—” He blushes hard, because he knows what his dad means, and he knows about that stuff because Danny always likes to brag about what goes on at his summer camp when he comes home, and he _definitely_ doesn’t want to talk about that with Dad.

“You should be able to talk to me about these things,” Dad tells him, but he has never looked so uncomfortable, ever. “I know we don’t—and I trust that you know that hockey comes first, always, but your mother has said and I basically agree that being social is important, too. Hockey’s first, but it doesn’t have to be the only thing.”

Sidney stares at his father, completely baffled, because of course it does. Geno is proof that hockey is the future, that it’s everything, and that it will be for years to come. He can’t imagine living life any other way. “I—how would I even have time for girls?”

“That’s my point exactly,” Dad says. He looks like someone is stabbing him in the stomach repeatedly, his face twisted and sour, and Sidney just really wants him to leave. “If that’s—it’s probably an interest for you, or it will be really soon, and if it is, we can make time—”

_We_ Sidney mouths to himself incredulously, but he quickly says, “I don’t need to. Um. I don’t need time for girls, it’s really fine.”

Dad sags a little, whether in relief or disappointment, Sidney doesn’t know. “Okay,” Dad says slowly, carefully. “Just know that, if that ever changes—”

“Okay.”

“—you really can talk to me. And if you have any questions—”

“ _Dad_.”

“No, really, _any_ questions, you shouldn’t be embarrassed or feel like you can’t—I’m not just here for hockey, eh?”

Sidney smiles down at his bedspread, still ridiculously uncomfortable, but finally finding the humor in this. “Yeah, I know, Dad. I’ll—ask you? If I need to.” Which he won’t, not any time soon, he thinks.

Dad nods shortly, claps him on the knee, then hesitates and hugs him very quickly. Sidney clings back for a minute, not really surprised but pleased, and then he lets him go, watching him head for the door. Sidney thinks carefully, because on one level he wants his dad to leave, as long as he keeps talking about girls. He wants to giggle to think of mistaking Sidney hanging out with Geno, a time-traveling hockey player, with him hanging out with a girl, as if those two things are even in the same universe. But of course Dad doesn’t know about Geno.

“Dad,” Sidney says, before Dad clears the doorway. “Can I ask you something? Not about girls. Or, um, about hockey.”

Dad looks back at him and blinks, face carefully blank. “Of course. Go for it.”

“Do you know anything about people who can time travel?” Sidney asks carefully, and he watches his Dad’s face go even blanker.

 

Eddie Shore spent a lot of time in the penalty box. He had 130 penalty minutes in his first season with the Bruins, ended Ace Bailey’s career, and is remembered as one of the Hockey Hall of Fame’s toughest members.

He is also remembered for a moment in which he disappeared from the box, in full view of all teammates, opposing players, and Boston spectators. He reappeared about 10 minutes later in the same exact spot, naked and snarling, his shoulders set as if he was still holding his stick.

He was the first, and maybe the most famous, but not the last hockey player to travel through time in the middle of a game. A handful of other players with short-lived careers have done it, Dad tells him, but few have talked about their experiences much. Eddie Shore helped write about it.

They pick up the book from the library in Halifax, and Sidney reads it four times. He is reading it a fifth when Dad tells him he’ll need to check the book out again or the late fee will come out of his allowance; he does that three more times until the night he scores a hat trick against Chebucto, when Dad presents him with his own copy.

“Don’t tell your mother,” Dad says, winking at him.

Mom doesn’t like Sidney’s interest in time travel. She mutters darkly about the terrible time her friend Lorna had had with her oldest daughter, who disappeared from her bed when she was six years old and kept disappearing for years after that, turning up naked and sometimes injured. “It’s a terrible thing that happens to people,” Mom says disapprovingly. “It’s not exciting, it’s not magic, and I don’t want you to talk about it with your sister.”

Sidney doesn’t like to hear that, doesn’t like to think about how bad things could go for Geno, but really that’s why he’s doing this. Shore’s book doesn’t help assuage his fears, his stories of traveling rough and scary and _real_.

Shore writes that what he hated the most was returning to the night he’d knocked out Ace Bailey for good. He returned to that night over and over again and saw it happen from different angles, until he felt like he was going insane, stuck in a hellish time loop. There was never any cure for it that he could see, until one suddenly fell into his lap.

This is news that Sidney brings on his fifteenth birthday, among some other news. He is vibrating with anticipation and anxiety, hoping that Geno arrives in one piece, that nothing worse had happened to him while he was injured. He can only be sure that Geno will come; future Sidney told him he would, and so it is a sure thing. All he can do is wait.

When Geno arrives, he is standing, and he stays standing. Sidney is so happy that he forgets to cover his eyes while Geno dresses. Instead, he stands up, too, and bumps fists with Geno as soon as he sticks his arms through Sidney’s father’s sleeves. Geno smiles at him.

“Hi, Sid.”

“You’re okay!” Sidney says. He wants to hug Geno but they’ve never hugged before; part of him knows that he will hug Geno many, many times in the future, because they are teammates and teammates have to hug all the time, but that is a different Sidney. He is not there yet. So he controls himself, his hands twitching at his sides. “Are we still playing hockey together?”

Geno’s face does something funny, and he sits down slowly, but he nods firmly, and that’s all Sidney needs. “Yes. Still on same team.” He eyes Sidney a little warily until he forces himself to sit down, trying not to blush. “Okay?”

“I’m okay,” Sidney says quickly, and he looks Geno over. “Are you okay? How’s your knee?”

“Knee is good. Was many months ago for me, all better now, heal good, and—” He smiles, small and like a secret. “Playing very good now.”

“Great!”

“Haven’t—haven’t done this in while, traveled like this.” Geno’s hands flex over his own knees, like he’s restless or uncomfortable. Sidney tries not to stare—he might stare at Geno a lot, just like he thinks about him a lot, and that’s—that’s probably weird. “Not sure I come again, but Sid—big Sid, my Sid, he tells me I do, so.”

It takes him a little while of pointedly not staring, but thinking uncontrollably, for Sidney to figure out why Geno sounds so weird. He’s _disappointed._ Visiting Sidney means he’s still traveling, that this is still a thing that’s happening to him, and that’s—Sidney loves Geno’s visits. But he wants him to be safe, too.

This is why he pulls Eddie Shore’s book out from where he’s rolled it up and stuck it in the pocket of his hoodie. It’s worn and scribbled on, pages folded enough that Mom clucks her tongue if she ever catches him with it. “Geno,” Sidney says slowly; he’d practiced what he would say many, many times. He holds the book out. “Have you read this?”

Geno takes the book, and his face kind of—he looks like he’s going to cry. He looks like Billy looks whenever he’s been pulled before the second period, like he’s been punched in the face but waiting for another punch that never comes. It’s a while before Geno answers him.

“Yes.” Geno’s sigh is heavy and thick. “Not whole thing, but. I know story. Lots of people know story. And Sid—big Sid—he show me this book, when I come to—to play with him. And so does Ma—so does team boss, he buy me Russian copy.” Geno shrugs guiltily. “I don’t read much, and it just make me sad when I already know how story ends.”

“But it has a happy ending,” Sidney says insistently, grabbing for the book again and flipping to the back. This is the part he has read over and over again, highlighted and underlined and dog-eared so much that his Dad winces whenever he sees it, muttering that it’s a good thing they’ve given up on the library books. “Shore got cured, Geno! He was like you, and it was worse because sometimes he’d disappear in the middle of games. He was good enough and it was new enough that teams didn’t mind as much, but other guys—they do it a few times and it means the end of their careers.”

“I know this, Sid. I am lucky.” The word _lucky_ is spat-out and bitter, and Sidney doesn’t like Geno’s voice like that at all.

“But then he fixed it! He and his wife were together for a while and they—their relationship was so strong and good and perfect—”

“They were soulmates,” Geno says. His voice is still bitter, not at all like Mom’s voice when she talks about soulmates. This is the kind of magic that she likes to talk about; she has told him stories, not about her and Dad, but about other couples she knows, people who make each other whole and good and real. The way Eddie Shore tells it, soulmates anchor each other, and once Shore let his wife anchor him in the present, he stopped traveling out of it.

“Right,” Sidney says. He is trying not to sound too excited, because he’s starting to feel stupid. This isn’t going at all like he’d imagined. “So—so that’s it, Geno. You just need to find your soulmate—”

“Is not so easy,” Geno tells him, and Sidney tries not to groan out loud in frustration. “You don’t go outside and say ‘I am here, soulmate, come now’ and soulmate appear and everything is okay. Not work like that.”

“Of course not. But at least you can—you can still _try_ to find an anchor, right?”

Geno shakes his head. Sidney wants to hit him. “Already have anchor. Hockey is anchor, hockey is soulmate.” He grins at Sidney, all teeth, practically a snarl, while Sidney lets that bit of hopelessness wash over him. “I am lucky, yes?”

“That’s not—” He still wants to hit Geno. He also wants to hug him, and keep hugging him, but the thought of Geno slipping from his grasp like fog again makes Sidney cold all over, chilled to his core. He hugs himself instead, head bowed as he tries to work this out, because it needs to work out. “But—you have to retire someday.”

“Yes.” Geno’s voice is very grave and, worse, resigned. Sidney feels cold again.

“You can’t always play hockey. And—and in three years, you’ll stop visiting me.” Sidney swallows hard. “We don’t know why that happens.”

“No, we don’t.” They both fall quiet, and Sidney feels his eyes start to sting. He squeezes them shut and sniffles stubbornly, keeping his head down until he’s sure he won’t cry at all.

“Sid,” Geno says, kind of gentle. “Talk about other things. Talk about school, you go somewhere—”

“You already know about that,” Sidney says. His voice breaks and he has to squeeze his eyes shut once more. “You know about—you know about the book and the anchor and you know that you can’t find one because hockey—hockey _can’t_ be your only anchor, Geno!”

“Never hear of two soulmates,” Geno says. He sounds apologetic and still gentle, but Sidney still can’t look at him. Sidney hasn’t ever heard of two soulmates, either, but it’s something he wants to research immediately, something he plans on asking his mother about as soon as possible. “Sid—”

“I don’t get you,” Sidney spits out. “I don’t—how can you just accept something like this? It’s not fair.” He remembers years ago, one of their first visits, and gets angry all over again. “It’s cheating!”

“Who is cheat?” Geno asks him, and Sidney hears the small smile in his voice but doesn’t want to acknowledge it.

“I don’t know! The universe, or whoever—whatever made you like this, whatever did this to you. It’s cheating you out of a cure.”

Geno shrugs again. It’s completely infuriating to watch him do that, and Sidney wants to throw things at him, words or rusty fishing gear, until Geno starts throwing something back besides flat acceptance. “Can’t know future, Sid,” Geno says quietly. “Only know for three years, I still travel, see you. Know I have at least three more years with team and with hockey and you and right now, where I come from, having a good time. Everything is good for me. Can be happy not knowing how to fix, as long as I can—as long as everything is good now. Can’t ask for more than that.”

“Yes,” Sidney says. “Yes, you _can_.”

“Don’t know how,” Geno says. Now all Sidney can do is feel frustrated with his future self, who has apparently failed at getting Geno to come around on this.

“Tell about school.”

Sidney has to blink away stupid, irrational tears again, keeping his head down so Geno won’t see. Maybe this is why future Sidney has had no luck with Geno; maybe he’s still this weak and scared when he’s older, still feels too much when he knows he has to figure how to turn this stuff off. “I’m leaving soon,” Sidney says, fast so the break in his voice isn’t very noticeable. “It’s—it’s gonna be great. Shattuck has a great hockey program, and I’ll be able to concentrate, no—no distractions like I have here. All the attention I’ve been getting—it’s kind of getting bad.”

He doesn’t want to talk about how bad it gets. He wonders if Geno knows, and when he peeks up, Geno’s face is dark, so he must. Sidney looks down again, because whatever anybody says to him, whatever anybody tries to do to him—none of it is as bad as watching his mom hear about it, or much worse, his dad, or even Billy, who once charged another goalie three times his size just for slashing Sidney in the back of the knees.

“Sid,” Geno says after a minute. “Look at me.”

Sidney does it reluctantly, distinctly embarrassed, and Geno’s gentle look doesn’t help. He moves like he wants to reach out, then stops and shakes his head, muttering in Russian shortly. He clenches his hands in his lap and bows his head just a little before he speaks again. “Is okay be—will be new place, little scary. I am scared too when I leave home, and I am older than you first time.”

“No,” Sidney says immediately. “No, you were six when you first left home, right? You were six and you had no idea what was going on and you wound up in a strange place in the past, maybe with bad people, and that’s way worse than just going to stupid boarding school.”

Geno sounds a little frustrated when he says, “Different, Sid. And was not bad, first time—I go to past and meet grandma when she is young, she give me cookies and blanket and sit with me until I go home. Not same thing, but not worse.”

“It’s stupid to be scared.”

“No. Not stupid. Everyone get scared all the time. They say they not scared, they lie.”

“Can you tell me that it works out?” Sidney asks, hating how young and pleading he sounds. “It’s—it’s worth it, right? Can you cheat just once?”

It takes Geno a while to answer him. He looks torn, and angry with himself, and maybe angry with Sidney; it’s hard to tell sometimes, who’s mad at him and who’s just mad at themselves. But eventually, he takes a deep breath and says, “Where I come from, you are best hockey player in the world. So yes. Worth it.”

“Don’t lie, Geno,” Sidney snaps. “You can just tell me you won’t cheat.”

“Not lying. Is truth. You are best, Sid. I tell you when you are seven, I tell you when 15, and I tell when you are 24, where I am from. Promise.”

Sidney doesn’t know if he believes Geno. He doesn’t know if he wants to believe Geno. Part of him needs to believe that Geno’s just getting around cheating, and needs to keep thinking that way, because—suddenly, the future is absolutely terrifying, huge and absolute. He has to squeeze his eyes shut.

“Going now,” Geno says apologetically, and Sidney forces his eyes open and shakes his head.

“Please don’t.”

“Have to. Sorry. Happy birthday.”

“I don’t want you to go,” Sidney says, but the last few words are said to the empty boathouse.

 

 

“Mom,” Sidney says. His voice is careful and measured so it won’t break; he’d practice in the bathroom, over and over again. “Can people have two soulmates?”

Mom frowns a little at her crossword before she looks up, her face open and soft. The sounds of Dad and Taylor laughing at something on the TV are faint from here in the kitchen, where Sidney has been sitting at the table with Mom, thumbing listlessly through the Eddie Shore book.

Mom’s eyes have her usual half-curious, half-suspicious light, but she looks over for a few moments and must see something there that he probably doesn’t want her to. She says, “No, sweetie. That’s not possible. Why do you ask?”

“But what about people whose soulmates are like—their jobs?” Sidney pointedly ignores her question and clenches his book in his hand. It is getting harder and harder not to tell anyone about Geno.

There is a weighted, pointed quiet after that, and Mom looks sad when she speaks again. “Well, yes, that happens sometimes. It’s—it can be wonderful and it can be very, very lonely. It depends on the person.” She reaches out to pat him on the arm, rubbing over his inexplicably goosebumped skin. “You know that being soulmates isn’t something that just happens. Two people have to accept it. They feel the signs and they feel that it’s right and it’s a decision they make.”

She sighs, her eyes going a little dreamy, like they always do when she talks about soulmates. Sidney drinks up the sight eagerly, and bites his lip to keep from asking about her and Dad. “But not everyone decides that, right,” Sidney says. “It’s—you have to accept it. Does it work the same way with a job?”

“A little bit,” Mom says, thoughtful. “Some people decide not to accept their soulmate, because—well, there is some risk. You get so wrapped up in a person, they become your whole world, and it can be a little—there are some people who don’t find it so romantic.”

“But with a job—” Sidney starts insistently, and Mom chuckles at him, though her eyes have narrowed.

“With a job, it’s a little different. For a job or a hobby or anything like that, it’s not reciprocal. A rock collection can’t love you back. But you submit yourself to whatever it is, accept it as the most important part of you, until it becomes your whole life.” Mom looks sad again. “And there’s no room left for anything else to ever be that important to you.”

“What about something that’s already really important,” Sidney says. His voice has gone quiet without his permission, a little hushed. “What about something that’s way too big to just be a job?”

“Sid,” Mom says, a little harsh. “Hockey is not—”

“I’m not talking about me,” Sidney rushes out, and he really hadn’t even considered it. Hockey is huge. It has been his life forever, the hugest part of him that exists, and if there’s never any more room in his heart for anything or anyone else, he’s fine with that. He has enough, he thinks, looking at his mom, listening to Dad and Taylor, swallowing hard and thinking of Billy and, someday, Geno, the team they’ll have together. They all fit, they’ll always fit, no matter how he feels about hockey.

“You’re going to meet so many people, Sid, lots of girls that will love you because you’re wonderful and kind. And someday you’ll meet the right one and maybe it’ll be right enough that she’ll be your soulmate, and you’ll want that.” Mom’s face is hard and, fast enough that Sidney thinks he might’ve imagined it, she glances toward the den. “Hockey is not going to keep you from having that.”

“Okay,” Sidney says, but really he couldn’t care less.

“You can’t have two soulmates,” Mom tells him very firmly. “Hockey can’t love you back.”

Sidney thinks about how tightly Geno had held onto his hand in the boathouse that one time. He thinks of Taylor shrieking in happiness when she stops one of his shots, and Billy and the rest of his teammates, how he feels when he’s crushed under a pile of pads and bodies and violent, wonderful joy. He can’t remember the first time he successfully scored on Dad, but he remembers Dad leaping out of the net to hug him tight, until they were both breathlessly happy, laughing.

He thinks his mother is wrong.

 

 

The only constant at Shattuck is hockey. Everything else is different: the people, the coursework, the food, and little things that make Sidney constantly feel a step or two behind everyone else. For the first week or so, he remembers what Geno said about it being worth it, remembers hugging Dad goodbye and hiding his face in his shirt, and thinks that what Geno said can’t possibly be true.

But there is hockey, and through hockey come friends. Through friends comes some kind of familiarity, a level of comfort just slightly edging out the whirling, fearful mess of feelings he’s desperate to hide. Jack is solid and kind and doesn’t mind that Sidney kind of latches on to him, and stays latched even when there are others to cling to.

The best thing is that everybody lives in each other’s pockets, and everyone’s centered mostly around hockey. Sidney stands out for what he can do on the ice, not because he wants to do it almost all the time, and the team sticks together, fitting with each other like puzzle pieces in a way Sidney’s never really experienced before.

Drew needs someone to make sure he doesn’t sleep past his alarm every morning, so Sidney does that for him a lot, saving him breakfast. Drew is better at math than Sidney and so he always makes sure to do math homework while Sidney answers their history questions; then they swap. Matt’s roommate is close to getting kicked out for sneaking girls in, but that still means Matt gets displaced every once in a while, and he’s always welcome on any teammate’s floor. When it’s Sidney’s room, Sidney offers to take the floor instead; some guys think it’s weird that he’s that nice, but he thinks they’re all just as nice to him, in different ways.

This is what he reports back to his family and to Geno, when he sees them at Christmas. It is wickedly cold in the boathouse and Sidney brings extra blankets. He wishes they could huddle closer, like he and Drew do sometimes when they’re doing homework and the library is drafty, but Geno is being a little weird, a little distant, like he wouldn’t like that, so Sidney stays distant, too.

The parts with Drew are parts of school that Sidney doesn’t tell Geno, though he kind of wants to. It might be telling that Geno doesn’t ask him if he’d met any girls at school; everyone else has, and Sidney wonders what that means for his future, what Geno knows about him.

Sidney doesn’t know much about himself yet. All he knows is that he likes when Drew bumps their hands together or smuggles an extra piece of cake to Sidney’s dorm, and he doesn’t really know what that means. Maybe he just likes cake.

“See,” Geno says when Sidney stops for breath. “Tell you it work out.”

“Yeah,” Sidney says, and he smiles at Geno gratefully. Geno seems to try to smile back, but it’s not the same. He looks tired, and Sidney wonders if he’s thinking about the fact that Geno will only see Sidney in the past four more times after this visit. He wonders if that makes Geno scared; it definitely frightens the hell out of Sidney, though school is a good distraction.

He feels compelled to blurt out the excuse he keeps giving to everyone, though Geno hadn’t asked for it. “There isn’t a lot of time for, um, girls,” Sidney says. Geno’s face goes very, very blank, so blank that he has to be unhappy, so Sidney hastily changes the subject. “But the library is huge, I found this awesome book about anchoring bonds and traveling. Did you know that some people can use their anchors to not just cure the traveling, but control it?”

“Hm,” Geno says noncommittally. He still doesn’t look happy, but this is something Sidney wants to talk about, needs Geno to hear. He has a feeling he’s heard it before, though.

“Yeah, so, you can actually pick where you want to go, and take things with you, like clothes or—” Sidney swallows hard. “Or your anchor, you can take your anchor with you. Wouldn’t that be really cool?”

“Be a little hard for me, take whole hockey rink with me,” Geno says. His chuckle is dry and raspy and doesn’t sound good at all.

“Geno.”

“Not gonna fight about it again, Sid. Fight with my Sid, come back and fight with young Sid.” Geno _sounds_ tired, and Sidney wants to ask him so many things. He could fill twenty notebooks with the questions he wants to ask now.

But all he asks is, “Hey, are we still playing hockey together?”

He holds his breath until Geno says, “Yes. We will still play together.”

“Why are you so obsessed with time travel?” Jack asks him once break is over, shoving between Drew and Ryan at their table in the library. Sidney’s eyes flick guiltily to the librarian on instinct, because Jack is kind of loud, but she’s not paying any attention, so he puts down his book and shrugs.

“I don’t know. It’s interesting, right?”

“It’s weird,” Jack says, sliding the book that Sidney had been reading over and thumbing through it. He makes a face at one of the pictures, nudging Ryan and showing him until he giggles a bit and rolls his eyes. Sidney rolls his eyes, too, and works not to snatch the book back. “I guess it would be cool to go to the future, though.”

“Some people don’t go to the future,” Sidney says. “They only go to the past. And sometimes they go to the same moment in the past, over and over again, like—”

“Like Eddie Shore and Ace Bailey,” Jack finishes, flipping through the book too fast to actually be looking at it. “We all know the story.”

“Do you think Ace Bailey ever got creeped out, seeing some naked guy pop in on him all the time?” Drew asks, looking thoughtful. Sidney feels himself color slightly, and it’s an effort to not blurt out _well, I didn’t mind_ , and Jack cuts in before Sidney can.

“I think Bailey was too busy getting knocked out to notice a naked guy.”

“Oh come on, he had to notice the naked guy at least once, right?”

“You’re really fixating on this naked guy thing,” Jack says, smirking. Drew flicks him in the ear.

“It only happened for Bailey once,” Sidney says, and Drew’s face screws up a little, trying to parse that. “It happened for Shore loads of times, but Bailey only had to go through it once. He was the lucky one.”

“He was the one who couldn’t play hockey anymore,” Ryan says, the only one who bothers to keep his voice lowered. “I wouldn’t call that lucky.”

They all go quiet then. Sidney doesn’t like to think about careers ending; Ryan is right, there can’t be anything lucky about that. And then Jack groans and puts his head down on the book, groaning again when Sidney reaches across and shoves him off. “Time travel is confusing.”

“Not really,” Sidney says, opening his book.

He reads about Ace Bailey that night, though, under his blanket with a flashlight so he doesn’t keep Ryan up. He wonders if Bailey and Shore ever talked again beyond that famous handshake at Bailey’s benefit game, and if Bailey truly did forgive Shore. Shore never wrote or told anything much about Bailey himself; most of what Sidney finds has nothing to do with Shore, focusing instead on Bailey’s career, how it ended, and what he did after. But they changed each other’s lives, one way or another. Sidney thinks that’s important.

Maybe if they had been teammates, it would be different. There are few people more important to Sidney than his team right now. He eats, sleeps, studies, and drinks for the first time with his team.

It’s more intense than back home, more complete, and at night Sidney thinks about living this way with Geno. He gets excited, eyes the other bed, and goes to the bathroom. Then he showers for the second time before bed, trying not to think, because if he thinks—he knows, _knows_ you’re not supposed to think like that about a teammate, present or future.

This doesn’t stop Drew from playfully dragging Sidney on top of him one morning when he wakes him up, giggling with his eyes squeezed shut while Sidney tries to knee him and complain. Drew slits his eyes open and one of Sidney’s legs winds up slotted between Drew’s thighs; it’s like the kind of position that Jack brags about stumbling into all the time, even though they all know he can’t exactly sneak girls into his parents’ house.

“Hi,” Drew says, and Sidney tries, he really does, not to smile at him. It doesn’t work. Drew is warm and his hands are strong on Sidney’s wrists, and he doesn’t know if he can call it bravery when he leans down and kisses Drew with lips that feel frozen. He is completely terrified, so he’s not sure it counts.

The seconds between when Sidney’s mouth touches Drew’s and Drew kisses back seem to last forever. Drew chuckles a little, too, and in some of the nightmarish scenarios involving this sort of thing, whoever Sidney had kissed would laugh at him, sometimes before he punched him, sometimes after. Sometimes the nightmare person would be Geno.

But Drew just chuckles and kisses back, shifting his hips a little so that Sidney feels something—an erection, Sidney’s stunned brain eventually supplies—pressed against his thigh. Sidney says, “Oh,” like a dumbass and Drew pulls his mouth all the way away to mockingly repeat, “ _Oh,_ ” and laugh at Sidney. He kisses Sidney again, though, too.

They kiss until Drew’s chuckles die down, and their mouths open a little, and Drew’s hips move a little, until Sidney wants to move his hips, too. He thinks that’d be okay. But then Drew says, “Okay, get off me,” and Sidney rolls, fast and panicked and right off the bed.

He withstands Drew laughing at him, strained in a way that makes Sidney deeply satisfied and embarrassed. He’s on the floor and he has a boner and he’s glad he never had any romantic notions of a first kiss, not like his mom would want for him, because he’s pretty sure this doesn’t fit the bill.

Drew kind of screws his face up, seeming to concentrate, and then he says, “Yeah, I’m gonna—” and makes a jerking off motion.

Sidney nods, nonplussed, and waits for instruction, and Drew just stares back at him. “Dude, you can—you don’t have to stay? That’d be kind of gay, right?”

“Oh,” Sidney says. He’s completely baffled and he’s sure it shows, because Drew looks like he wants to laugh again. “But I thought—”

“I’m not gay,” Drew says quickly. He doesn’t look like wants to laugh anymore, or maybe if he did laugh, it would be nervous. “I’ve never let a guy watch me jerk it.”

“Me neither,” Sidney says, and he doesn’t specify which he means. He liked kissing Drew, and he wants to do it again, and he’d watch him jerk off and help if Drew wanted him to, but—“Okay, I’ll see you later,” Sidney says, getting up.

He waits in the hallway, facing the wall, for a few minutes, so he doesn’t have to walk back to his room with an obvious boner, it’s bad enough when that happens in class. But he stops waiting abruptly when he realizes that if he listens closely, he can hear Drew’s breaths, speedy and heavy, and he can picture exactly what he’s doing, and that’s not helping to kill his boner.

It’s a long walk back to Sidney’s room. He jerks off as soon as he checks the calendar and sees that Ryan is at an early student government meeting, and as soon as he can fumble his pants off. He’s late for his first class and probably beet-red, probably too obvious, but in math Drew looks perfectly normal, elbows him hard and slides over his notes to help.

Sidney jerks off more than he’s been comfortable with so far at boarding school. It feels like all the time between practice, games, homework and class is spent either jerking off or thinking about it. He thinks about doing it with Drew, for Drew, and more than that thinks about Geno, and until Drew kisses him again, he tortures himself with the wrongness of both. After their second kiss, which goes on for way longer and ends with Drew’s hands all over Sidney’s ass, only thinking about Geno feels wrong. It’s progress, at least.

He kind of wishes he could ask Dad how to stop thinking about sex all the time. Sidney has never devoted this much thought to something besides hockey in his life, and he’s kind of annoyed with Drew for making that happen. And maybe he always thought about Geno this much—maybe that’s always been kind of a problem, a little wrong in its own way—but he’d never thought of him like this. Geno had always been hockey for him. That was okay.

This is not okay. Drew helps, though, in a way; when Drew’s kissing him, Sidney is able to pointedly not imagine Geno doing it, though it’s harder, then, to control his thoughts when he’s alone again. In his head, Geno is a better kisser. He’s older and he knows what he’s doing and he doesn’t jerk him around as much.

It’s basically summer by the time Drew says, “Okay,” and shoves Sidney’s hand down his pants. Sidney wants to be annoyed, wants to slug him on the shoulder and tell him what an asshole he is, but he’s too busy wrapping his hand around someone else’s dick for the first time, and trying not to do something wrong.

Then he’s too busy laughing because Drew comes in like a minute, warm and wet over Sidney’s knuckles, groaning with a really, terribly dumb face on. “Asshole,” he mutters when Sidney keeps laughing, and he grips Sidney’s ass with his two hands and pushes him down, so that Sidney’s dick slots neatly between Drew’s thighs. Sidney gasps, thrusts a few time because he knows _that_ much, and comes nearly as fast, and this time it’s Drew’s turn to laugh.

They only get in a few more instances of stuff like that before the end of the school year. Sidney goes home knowing he’s not going to go back, and it’s sad, a little, but in a way that only lasts for a short, stinging while, a sharp hurt that Sidney shakes off back in Nova Scotia. By the time his parents have stopped asking him pointedly about girls, have even given up on exchanging looks they think Sidney can’t see when he tells one more totally innocent story about Drew, it all kind of seems like another wet dream.

He doesn’t bother telling anybody about the actual—whatever it had been with Drew. The first time he talks to Jack, though, Jack clears his throat half a dozen times, like he has a lot of mucus, and then finally forces out, “Are you sad that Stafford dumped you?”

Sidney laughs. First it’s nervous and then it’s genuine when Jack huffs indignantly. “Drew didn’t dump me.”

“Oh. Did you dump him?”

“No. It wasn’t like that. He’s not, um. He doesn’t like guys.”

Jack mutters “Fucking Stafford,” under his breath and Sidney can picture him rolling his eyes. He is struck with a strange, achy kind of homesickness, and remembers what Geno once said about the team being home. Now it’s Sidney’s turn to clear his throat, and then he says, “Hey, why would you assume he dumped me first?”

“Because you’re _nice_ ,” Jack says, and that starts a whole argument about how nice Sidney is or isn’t, until Dad yells at him to get off the phone unless he plans on paying the international bill.

Sidney doesn’t tell Geno, either. There’s no reason to waste time on Drew when it’s over, and when he has so little time left with Geno. It’s bad enough that he can’t stop thinking about Geno, that when he looks at him he blushes and has to look away.

“I’ve been reading,” Sidney says to his knees. He hears Geno sigh. They’re not in their usual spot; Sidney couldn’t get out of a birthday dinner with his grandparents and the moon is bright over the lake now. It’s a little chilly but Geno doesn’t seem to care, staring out over the water while Sidney sits in a lawn chair he’d dragged out of the boathouse.

It feels quieter out here than in the boathouse. Geno’s silence and distance seem to stretch out over the water, big and empty. And Geno looks tired. Sidney wants to ask him why he looks tired and why he can barely look at Sidney anymore. Sidney knows why he can’t look at Geno, and he is positive that Geno does not have the same excuse.

“And thinking,” Sidney says, when Geno doesn’t say anything. He thinks carefully some more, because Geno still isn’t say anything, and then allows himself just one question. “Am I your Ace Bailey?”

Like many of the questions that he wants to ask Geno, he doesn’t know what he wants the answer to be.

“ _No_ ,” Geno says immediately. He practically snarls it. Sidney blinks, and stares a little, and he can see Geno’s face set stubbornly, hard. “No. Bailey’s career end.”

“Mine hasn’t even started, Geno, that’s not what I meant.”

“Nothing like Bailey,” Geno insists, ignoring Sidney’s words completely but turning to face him. “You career not over. And I don’t—we are not like that.”

“I know, God, I just meant—”

“We teammates, remember? We still play hockey together.” Geno swallows hard and, in a smooth, careful motion, drops down to his knees in front of Sidney’s chair, looking him carefully in the eye. Sidney quails, drawing back and trying desperately not to blush. “Sid. We will play together. Promise.” Maybe it’s the moon, the still air of the night, but for a moment, Geno looks totally terrified, until Sidney can’t look at him again.

“Okay. I—I believe you.”

For the first time ever, it’s almost a relief when Geno leaves.

Dad finally works up the courage to talk to Sidney about Drew the night before he’s going to leave for Rimouski. It’s as awkward as any conversation like this has ever been with Dad, though it starts out hilarious because first Dad asks him about Jack. When Dad gets on the right track, though, and Sidney’s laughter dies down— _Jack_ , who lost his virginity to the girl goalie on the Madison Caps at a tournament in St. Cloud—he is suddenly brimming with nerves. There are so many things he still doesn’t know; 16 doesn’t hold any more answers than 15, and that is a disappointment.

Dad, though, he always has answers, even if they’re really hard to hear. This one sounds hard, words pulled from him like teeth: “Sid, if you’re—if you need to—if this is how—” and he curses at himself a little, soft and unhappy.

Sidney doesn’t say anything because he doesn’t know quite what to say. It was easy to just kiss Drew and touch him, and try not to think about what that meant. He had never been as good as Drew at saying he’s not gay, though.

They are both quiet for a long, long time, in Sidney’s bedroom that he is about to leave behind again. And then Dad says, “It’ll be so damn hard for you, kid,” and he sounds sadder than Sidney has ever heard him.

Sidney’s chest feels tight, and when he says, “I’m sorry,” it hurts his throat. Dad makes an angry sort of noise and shakes his head hard.

“No. You don’t say that. That’s not what this is.”

“Then—then what is it?” Sidney asks, mostly terrified to find out.

“This is me saying that, well—I’m probably gonna get banned from some more rinks. And I don’t really care about that. But there are things I can’t protect you from, and if this—if you—if this is who you are, you’re gonna have to be careful.”

“I will,” Sidney says. He sounds incredulous to his own ears, a little disbelieving, and Dad doesn’t look entirely assured.

“I wish it could be different, that you could just be how you are and nobody would ever say anything. But—you’ve worked so hard your whole life, Sid, and I won’t ever let anyone take that away from you.” He hears the words as clearly as if Dad had spoken them: he is scared for Sidney. Sidney is suddenly glad that Mom wasn’t the one to have this talk with him, because she would probably cry, and that would make Sidney cry and maybe rethink every feeling he’s ever had, force any of the difficult ones away.

It is hard enough to break his father’s heart, but Dad’s voice is steadier when he says, “But whatever happens—listen to me, okay—whatever happens, I never want you to apologize for this again. Not to me, not to anyone. No apologies. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Sidney says, as steady as he can. He knows that Dad is asking him to be brave, and it’s always been easier to be brave for someone else. “No apologies.”

“You don’t apologize for being better, or different, not ever.”

“Yeah, Dad.” He smiles into Dad’s shoulder when he hugs him, half bitter, half grateful.

“Remember what we say?” Dad’s voice has gone a bit weaker, strained, and Sidney finds himself straining to believe him when he continues, “Those who mind don’t matter, and—”

“—those who matter don’t mind.” Sidney swallows and hugs his Dad just a little tighter. “I know.” He wishes the world actually worked that way, but for a moment, it is enough to know that Dad wishes the same thing for him.

It is harder than ever to leave home again after that.

 

 

Sidney is still 16 when he sees Geno again during the scant few days he has to spend at home for Christmas. He is 16 but feels kind of like a different person. He has kissed a girl, done much more with a boy, started truly learning a new language, and hockey now feels like a career more than it ever has.

He doesn’t have nearly as much time to research time travel anymore, and only so much room in his head or heart to worry about Geno. He knows there will come a time when Geno becomes a hugely pivotal part of his world, but now that that future doesn’t seem so distant, his time with Geno feels less precious. Soon, Sidney will know Geno and they will be on a level playing field. Geno won’t always know more than him, and the only reason he’ll have any power over Sidney will be because of Sidney’s stupid crush.

Maybe it’ll be gone by then. Maybe Sidney will meet Evgeni Malkin as he is in the present, not Geno from the future, and he won’t like him as much. Sometimes Sidney feels that liking people is too hard; often it hurts too much. Liking Geno hurts too much because this person that visits him is almost like a ghost; there is a time limit, an ending edging closer, and for all Sidney knows, that means there could be an ending for them years in the future, when they are both in their 20s. It could hurt to stay attached.

Geno keeps his now customary distance when he sees Sidney, and for once, Sidney doesn’t push him. That’s why it’s a surprise when Geno leans forward in one of the lawn chairs, folds his hands together, and says, “Gonna cheat, Sid.”

“Really?” Sidney blurts out, and then he shakes his head and quickly adds, “I mean. Okay. Can I ask—”

“No. Just gonna tell you something, promise you. Have to listen carefully and remember.” Geno takes a deep breath, staring at his hands. “Remember. You play hockey again.”

That doesn’t make any sense to Sidney. “I’m—but I’m playing hockey now, what do you mean again?”

Geno squeezes his eyes shut. “Just remember, when you older. You play hockey again.” He takes another deep breath, shuddery and wet. “You are 24 and you play hockey, and everything okay. Promise.”

“I don’t understand,” Sidney says, but Geno’s expression tells him that he’s done cheating. Sidney can’t imagine ever needing that reassurance, and once Geno is gone, he stays awake at night conjuring scenarios in which he would need it. He comes close to obsessing, wondering about injuries, about how hockey feels like forever to him and how it might not be—but Geno says he is 24 and he’s playing. 24 feels like forever away.

At 16, Sidney has enough going on that 24 and anything terrible that could come before it can slip to the back of his mind. It’s a fear like a dull, forgotten toothache, twinging only when his mind wanders there. Hockey still feels like forever and Sidney can’t imagine a future where that’s not true, not yet.

And when he turns 17 and sees Geno for the last time before he is meant to meet Evgeni Malkin, Sidney should be sadder than he is. On some level, he is terrified, because it will be years before he knows _this_ Geno, the Geno who came to him when he turned seven and promised him hockey. And maybe he will only have a few years after that with this Geno; he doesn’t know what happens in the future after Geno goes back. Geno doesn’t, either.

But he’s not sad, not really. He’s determined to make the most of meeting the Evgeni Malkin he will meet, to follow him and learn from him and teach him what he can. “How old are you?” Sidney asks nonetheless, because he wants to know about time. He has always wanted to know about that.

Geno doesn’t even bother complaining about cheating. “26,” he says quietly. “Will be 27 next month.”

26\. He has at least until Geno’s 26. Sidney tries not to shake. “So, you’re—do you have a soulmate?”

“Always have, all along,” Geno says, and Sidney sighs noisily, because that is not what he meant. He didn’t mean _hockey._ “I know is scary because last time, but—”

“I’m not scared,” Sidney snaps. “I just—I want to know what happens, why you stop seeing me.”

“Want to know too, but. Can’t.” Geno smiles a small, crooked smile. There are more wrinkles around his mouth, stress lines or laughter lines, Sidney can’t really tell. His hair is a little thinner in the middle. For him, it has only been three years since he first met Sidney as a child. It feels like a whole lifetime for Sidney. “Maybe I ask Shore. He know future.”

“Eddie Shore is dead. He died before I was born, God Geno, it’s like you’re clueless on purpose sometimes.”

“Maybe I go see him before you born,” Geno says, but he’s not smiling anymore. Sidney remembers when he used to smile at him for anything he said, if he was mad or happy or mean, anything. He has to wonder what his grownup self has done to change how Geno feels about him.

“We’re still playing hockey together?” Sidney asks, his voice hushed without his permission.

“Yes,” Geno says, firm as always. “And maybe—maybe we play together always.”

“You can’t promise that. You just said you don’t _know_ —”

“Don’t know, can’t promise. But. I hope.”

“Why do you have to go?” Sidney says. His voice sounds weak and wrong and he hates it so much. He sounds like he’s seven again, demanding to know how Geno knows his name, and he feels like it, too. “Why can’t you just—can’t you just stay here so I know you’re okay, you’ll stay okay because you’ll be with me and then you can promise—”

“Can’t,” Geno tells him. He doesn’t sound nearly as unhappy about that as Sidney thinks he should. “All I can do is hope.”

It’s not enough for Sidney. He doesn’t want to hope. A large part of him wants to forget he’d ever met Geno, wonders if this will only set him up for more hurt in the future—Sidney will have known Geno longer than Geno will ever know him, and it’s not even comforting to think of how that concept would make Drew’s head spin.

It starts in that moment, really, even before Geno says, “Happy birthday, Sid,” and then, “Glad I meet you. Thank you.” Sidney starts to detach; he nods numbly, and in a terrible flash of weakness, tries to hug Geno, who flinches and then touches him like he’d touch a rabid dog. It’s a good thing, really, because Sidney thinks that if Geno held him back, Sidney would never be able to let go.

He starts letting go the second Geno fades from the boathouse. Geno is gone, and soon it will be time for Evgeni Malkin to come into Sidney’s life; it will be a long, long time before Geno, that Geno, is ever so important to Sidney again.

Really, Geno was right. They are not Ace Bailey and Eddie Shore. Those two changed each other’s lives irrevocably, unquestioningly, and while Sidney likes to imagine that that’s why Geno began visiting him almost ten years ago, he can’t quite believe it anymore. It was always about hockey. Sidney could never convince Geno otherwise.

Sidney heads back to Rimouski. Hockey has become terrifyingly huge for him, something so beyond shooting pucks into a dryer that it could make him shake. Sometimes it feels like his future has grabbed him by the shoulders and is tossing him around, hurtling him forward at a speed he’s never achieved before.

The name Evgeni Malkin drifts in and out of his consciousness. It’s a name he knows from hockey now, not just read off the crumpled sheets of paper he’d once practiced on, stick in a crumbly notebook that smells like salt and mold. Sidney tries hard to separate that name from Geno, tries not to attach the shadow of his crush to the idea of Evgeni Malkin, and he mostly succeeds.

He succeeds until the day that Evgeni Malkin gets drafted.

Sidney watches with his parents, though he had thought about skipping out. It is the first time he is seeing Evgeni at this age, and while there are things he knows—his birthday now, his height and weight, his hometown, and the fact that he will surely be the second overall pick, going to the Pittsburgh Penguins—he still gets knocked sideways by how young Evgeni looks. He looks _happy_ , beautifully, wondrously happy at his draft.

He has thicker hair, a slightly fuller face, but he is Geno, and any work that Sidney had managed in disconnecting them gets promptly destroyed. He has the same sweet eyes and kind smile and—

“Sid?” Dad asks, a frown in his voice. Sidney is leaning on the edge of his couch, his breath held, staring at the TV, as Craig Patrick mangles the pronunciation of Magnitogorsk and drafts Geno to the Penguins.

“Magnitogorsk,” Sidney corrects without really thinking, clumsy but better than Patrick, and his parents are staring at him. He’s too happy to be embarrassed, though. He had known that it would be the Penguins, but now it really is the Penguins, it’s official.

And as he watches Geno hug his family, climb onstage, shake hands and _beam_ and fold the brim of his Penguins hat before he jams it on his head, Sidney’s breath catches again. What’s happening on TV is his future, too. He has an official, proven name for where he’s going, and he can’t help but attach Geno’s face to it. It’s a perfect face.

In his living room, 17 years old, Sidney falls in love with his future, fast and complete.


	2. Part Two

 

 

  
**Part Two**  
 _2005-2009_

_I’m afraid that sometimes_  
 _you’ll play lonely games too._  
 _Games you can’t win_  
 _‘cause you’ll play against you._

 

There is a thump just outside the door to his room, loud enough that it should wake Lyosha. Zhenya holds his breath, listening, but Lyosha just tosses in his bed, muttering in his sleep before he stills again.

Zhenya relaxes, but tenses up when the door to his room opens very slowly, with a creak and sliver of hallway light inching across the floor. He curses silently because there is only one person who would just let himself in the room, the door to which Lyosha had dutifully kept unlocked so he could creep back in once he’d inevitably lost his key, and that is exactly whose shaggy head peeks through the door.

“Zhenya!” Sasha says in some approximation of a whisper, which means it causes Lyosha to grumble slightly and turn over once more. Zhenya sits up, putting his finger to his lips and moving to get out of bed, before he remembers that he is totally naked and he is very sick of being naked around people right now.

“Wait in the hall,” Zhenya whispers. Sasha tilts his head, frowning in confusion before coming further into the room with his hand cupped over his ear.

“What?”

“Get _out_ ,” Zhenya says through gritted teeth. When Sasha just blinks at him, wide-eyed and gap-toothed and not nearly as innocent as he looks, Zhenya rolls his eyes and adds, “Two seconds, please.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Sasha says brightly, and then of course he leers a little, roving his eyes up and down Zhenya’s body only half under the covers. Zhenya throws a pillow at him, Lyosha’s rest forgotten, and then puts his head in his hands when Sasha’s laughter rings through the room.

“Fucking quiet,” Lyosha mumbles, rough and sleepy and into his pillow. Sasha sticks his own hand over his mouth and laughs into it, but he finally steps back outside and waits for Zhenya to put clothes on.

Usually, clothes are the first things Zhenya seeks out when he returns to the present; they are often his first priority once he is in the past, if he’s not in any kind of immediate danger. A lack of clothes can sometimes put him in more danger.

He had come back tonight exhausted, though—popped right back into the blessedly empty hotel lobby where he had disappeared from earlier that night. The front desk was kind enough not to ask him any questions, though perhaps they had realized he would not be able to answer them, and had helpfully written down the time for him and passed him a blanket. Dizzy with relief that he hadn’t been gone long enough to miss the gold medal game, it had been all Zhenya could do to make it up to his room and collapse into bed.

He thinks he would’ve fallen asleep in just a few more moments, had Sasha not made a nuisance of himself. It is always easiest to fall asleep just after he comes back from traveling, because he knows he will wake up in the same place the next day. The universe has never been so unkind to Zhenya as to force him through time twice in the same day, and so he relishes the peace he gets just after returning to his time, knowing he can stay a while.

So he’s a little bitter as he yanks sweats out of his suitcase and tugs them on, with thick wool socks his mother forces on him all the time, though she knows he can’t take them with him when he travels.

If Zhenya could, he would go around all the time he’s not on the ice with a pair of shoes tied around his neck, because going barefoot wherever he lands is a pain, but they would not go with him either. Everything gets left behind.

His clothes from earlier are balled up in Sasha’s hands, his shoes on the floor next to where Sasha is sitting and waiting for him just outside the room. Zhenya smiles gratefully when he sees them and sits down, close but not too close, and Sasha huffs and scoots until their shoulders touch.

“You’re _back._ ”

“I always come back,” Zhenya says calmly, trying not to blush. Sasha has never seen him leave, and so Zhenya has never confirmed what he does to Sasha, though of course he had always heard the rumors and always pestered him about them, from the first day they met.

“Of course,” Sasha says, snorting. “Yes, I’m just supposed to know this, no big deal, of course you will come back after you disappear from the lobby like a ghost, why not—”

“Enough,” Zhenya says, though he can’t be too annoyed. Sasha’s right. He is just glad it was only Sasha and not the entire team that he has explain to, though if he could pick anyone on the team to explain to, Sasha would probably be at the bottom of the list. “In the future now, you’ll know I always come back.”

“That’s comforting. Wait.” Sasha goes stiff. “Is that where you went? To the future? Where did you go? No, that’s not right— _when_ did you go?”

He sounds gleeful and interested, like Denis had been the first few times, older and a little jealous that his little brother was special and he was not. Once, Denis had taken a leap at Zhenya and tried to hold on when it was clear that he was going. He had wanted to go with him. All he’d been left with were Zhenya’s clothes, clutched close in his arms, and he hadn’t really been too jealous after that.

“I didn’t go to the future. I never go to the future, only the past.” Zhenya rushes out the next explanation, the most important one he’s ever given, to every team he’s ever played for and every teammate who’s ever known about him. “And I never go anywhere when I’m on the ice.”

Sasha whistles, impressed. He bumps their shoulders. “Good. If you’re not there to pass to me tomorrow, how are we supposed to destroy those Canadian twerps?” His grin spreads so far across his face it’s visible from the side, and Zhenya sighs and waits for what’s coming. “And then you won’t get to crush your admirer.”

“Will you leave him alone?”

“Never,” Sasha says, his voice bright with promise. “We’re going to be rivals, you know. This is my duty. You will have to end things with him because you cannot date your countryman and best friend’s rival, I’m sorry.”

“We’re going to be rivals, too,” Zhenya points out, a fact that Sasha has been waving off since the draft. He ignores the best friend part, and the idea that there’s anything for him to end with Sidney Crosby, just like he’s been trying to ignore how much Sidney Crosby looks at him. It’s weird and disconcerting and he has no explanation for it, so it’s easier to ignore it for now, if Sasha would just shut up.

Sasha pats him on the knee. “No, I’m sorry, you’re not good enough to be my rival. A second overall rival, ha, you insult me.” He pauses, though. “Well. A second overall pick who can travel through time. You’re not as boring as I thought. Have you seen dinosaurs?”

Zhenya laughs. “No, no dinosaurs.”

“Where have you gone? Shit, _when_ have you gone?”

“You can say where, I know what you mean.” He thinks about what to tell Sasha—most people ask this question when he tells them what he does. His first girlfriend had nearly dumped him when he told her he had failed to listen to a Trotsky speech in 1917 because he was too concerned with finding clothes in the middle of crowded Petrograd; she later officially dumped him when he popped up naked in her bedroom hours after disappearing from it.

People think that time travel is exciting and interesting, that he gets to see the past and experience it in a way that nobody else can. It is nothing like that. The best experiences that Zhenya has had traveling have been ones when he is safe, when he sees people he knows or who will come to know him, and are kind to him. There have been too many experiences where that was not true. It makes the words, “I always come back” feel thinner and weaker in his throat.

The best parts of the past that he’s seen have been hockey. This is why the story he tells Sasha that night is one of hockey, and this is the only way he has ever felt lucky or gifted with time travel.

He is almost always safe in a hockey arena, be it an old barn or a gaudy new thing. Huddled in whatever out of the way pocket of space he can find, Zhenya is always freezing and almost always ignored and he always gets to watch.

“I went to the Ace Bailey benefit game tonight,” Zhenya tells Sasha. “The first All-Star Game. It was—” He laughs a little. “It was interesting.”

He has seen better games than that, though. He has seen Orr fly, Lemieux’s five goals five ways, the greats and the failures. Brett Hull’s foot was in the crease. With his breath held, Zhenya has watched Maltsev and Kharlamov, shouted for Bobrov, his voice swallowed up into the swell of the crowd and the past. He has gotten to relive hockey he’d seen as a child, and to live hockey few others in his time would ever get to.

This is the history he has been allowed to witness, and it is the only way that time travel has ever been a gift to him. That’s why he is glad that he saw hockey tonight, and that he can tell Sasha about it. Sasha leans in and listens and he won’t understand why Zhenya really hates the way he is, resents it deeply for nearly costing him his dream and risking it every time.

But at the end, when Sasha has gone as quiet as he ever gets, he eventually says, in a hushed voice, “Still. I’m glad you came back. I was afraid you wouldn’t come back.” And Zhenya thinks that maybe he does understand.

He doesn’t know how to be grateful for that. Instead he says, “Get some sleep. We have a game in a few hours, gold to win.”

Sasha grins again, and when they stand up he checks Zhenya into the wall with his shoulder, hard enough to make their teammates on their floor grumble, no doubt. “Piece of cake,” he says, eyes bright and so sure. It makes it difficult for Zhenya to roll his. “Canadians are nothing. We have a magic man.”

Zhenya isn’t dense enough to think Sasha’s talking about time travel. He’s talking about himself, and there—now Zhenya can roll his eyes.

“ _Sleep._ ”

“Don’t leave again,” Sasha says warningly. Zhenya nods.

“Not tonight.” He can’t make any promises for later, though.

The gold medal game is not a piece of cake, nor is there any magic. It’s brutal, a demoralizing, crushing blow to everything in Zhenya that loves and lives this game. There is nowhere he would rather be than on the ice, at any given moment, because it is where he is safest. But losing like this doesn’t feel safe. Watching Sasha go down injured almost makes him wish he could be anywhere else, any other place or time. Zhenya hates almost wishing that.

The only good news is Lyosha’s interrupted sleep is not evident; he is the only one to put a goal on the board for Russia. Canada tramples them, despite any best efforts, and Zhenya feels a burning, fleeting hatred that he only ever has room for when he’s on the ice. Off the ice, his time in the present is too precious for hate.

The hatred flares during the handshake line, bubbling just under his skin and making him feel itchy and mean. He wants to grind finger bones together, and every hand he takes grips him back just as hard, firm, rigid smiles in the face of his very obvious frustration.

Zhenya finds himself faced with Crosby before he is quite ready, and then the hatred does something different. Crosby is looking at him like he has this whole tournament, from the stands at times, and across the dining hall in the hotel, if the teams ever intersect at mealtimes. His eyes are bright and wide and searching, his cheeks are pinked, and he looks all of 12 years old, nothing like the rumored heir to Gretzky’s legacy.

Crosby hadn’t scored, and if Zhenya had the English he might remind him of this, but then—Crosby says something Zhenya doesn’t understand, and then he says something that sounds like, “Geno.” Zhenya still doesn’t understand that, and Crosby won’t let go of his hand, gripping it tighter than Zhenya had even attempted. Misha bumps him from behind, muttering, “Move it, Zhenya,” and Zhenya tries, but Crosby says, “Geno,” again, his voice filled with wonder. He squeezes Zhenya’s hand hard, and lets go, and all of the hate leaves him in one jarring swoop.

It is only after the rest of the now numbed handshakes are finished that Zhenya thinks to wonder who Geno is, or what. He watches as Sasha and Crosby shake hands, as the moment is snapped up with cameras because it already seems important, and he wonders for the length of time it takes for Sasha to be freed and to skate away, one arm cradled close, his shoulders slumped and his face thunderous.

Zhenya skates to him and slings an arm around him, and when he looks back Crosby is staring at them. He’s smiling, and Zhenya hates him again.

 

Zhenya is always leaving. This has been true since he was six years old, and it’s something he and his family have always had to live with. That’s why it is not difficult to convince him to stay when the time comes for him to leave for the NHL. If Zhenya can help it, he should stay.

“There has only been one of your kind that made any kind of impact over there,” Velichkin tells him, having pulled him away from his parents to talk freely. Zhenya works hard not to bristle at the words; Velichkin has paired with Rashnikov to be very kind to his family, taking them out for dinner and charming his father with tales of his playing days. “We’re your family here, and we can accommodate you.”

None of it is untrue, as inherently manipulative it is. Zhenya doesn’t like to think about “his kind”; hockey players are his kind, and from what he knows of Eddie Shore, they have little else in common. Time travel was something that Shore could bully his way through, an obstacle that he simply refused to allow to hold him back. Zhenya has always been more helpless than that.

Not on the ice, though. It doesn’t matter what ice, home or across the world, Zhenya doesn’t leave the ice. He can’t leave the ice behind. When he was ten years old, Zhenya hid at the rink so that his class would leave him behind. Papa found him that night huddled in the net, bundled but shivering and chilled through, and though he was angry for the first few moments, mostly he was sad. Zhenya never did it again.

Velichkin’s argument holds little weight, because no one in Russia has traveled through time and gotten to play hockey as much as Eddie Shore ever did. Denis points this out on the way home, when Zhenya is still thinking.

“You should go if you can,” Denis says stubbornly, and it starts another argument. Mama and Papa don’t want him to go. Zhenya is not sure that he can.

So he doesn’t go. Not after the lockout ends, and Sergei says, “You have a room in my house if you want it,” before he leaves to play for the Penguins. Zhenya likes Sergei, but a room in someone’s house is not home, and the NHL is still a dream. Hockey is how he has to live, and he can’t risk losing Magnitka for a room in someone’s house and a team he doesn’t know.

There is nothing bad about playing in Magnitogorsk, about making his family proud and getting to come home enveloped in their pride. He wears that feeling whenever he goes to the past, and it makes him feel safer no matter where or when he is, or who he meets.

Zhenya tries not to pay too much attention to the NHL. When the Penguins fail to make the playoffs, his teammates laugh and rib him a little, and Zhenya laughs along, and he ignores the sinking feeling in his gut, the idea that someone, somewhere, isn’t actually that proud of him. Sometimes he thinks of Crosby, but mostly he thinks of himself, and he tries not to be disappointed about the choice he made, which really didn’t feel like much of a choice.

Signing the contract to stay on with Magnitka doesn’t feel like much of a choice, either. He is pulled into negotiations on August seventh and not released until the early hours of August eighth, and he has never wanted to feel like a prisoner in his home, but he does by the time the new contract is signed.

Zhenya wants to be the best because his time on the ice is the biggest way he can impact the world. It is the only thing keeping him here, he is sure. Zhenya is supposed to play hockey, and playing in the NHL was the first thing he ever dared to dream of. It hurts to sign it away.

“I have something for you,” Denis tells him after they all go out to dinner to celebrate. Zhenya isn’t sure the mood he’s in is particularly celebratory; they had taken his passport, which he’s pretty certain isn’t standard contract protocol. Things are tense, even though his parents are ostensibly happy.

“You’re staying,” Mama keeps saying, cupping his face in her hands, her eyes soft and pleased. “There is nothing bad about that.”

Zhenya swallows hard, and simply nods.

But Denis hands him a square, wrapped package, stamped on and bruised up from mail travel. “It’s not from me,” Denis says quietly, and Zhenya thinks about not opening it, especially when he recognizes Pittsburgh in the return address.

He opens it, though. His breath catches in his throat when he recognizes Eddie Shore on the cover, Cyrillic characters sprawled across the top. When he opens it slowly, something is written in English on the inside of the cover. He doesn’t know enough yet to put it all together: _you_ registers, and _Pittsburgh_ , and _Sidney Crosby_ , but little else, until he gets to the end and sucks a breath in again.

_Mario Lemieux._

“You should go,” Denis says before Zhenya can say anything. “You should go because you can.”

Zhenya traces over the writing with his fingers— _Lemieux’s_ writing, and sometimes it feels like a dream, that he met Lemieux and shook his hand and that he can be a part of his team. He remembers the moment he first saw Lemieux play in person, remembers feeling small but suddenly so close to greatness, saw just a bit of what he hoped was in himself, and now he feels it again, looking at those words.

The rush of want that hits him then is terrifying. In a moment, staying in Russia feels like the worst thing he could possibly do to himself: worse than quitting hockey and damning himself to a life of time travel with no limits, nothing to keep him here. Hockey is it for him, hockey is the most that the present can ever give him, and in the NHL, hockey can be so much more.

“I’m going,” Zhenya says softly. That night he starts to read.

He has not finished Shore’s book when he talks to his parents, nor when he’s making surreptitious, nerve-wracking plans with J.P. Barry. Chunks of words sit lodged in his heart, hard to process even in his translated copy. It is not finished when he promises Mama he will come back someday, that this will always be his home. “I always come back,” Zhenya says, and he pointedly ignores the wetness of Papa’s eyes across the table, supposedly staying out of this, insisting that Zhenya’s choices are his own to make.

A quarter of the book has been dog-eared when Zhenya gets his passport back for training camp, and it sits heavy in his bag when he flies to Helsinki. Barry is waiting for him, with people who know how to handle these situations quietly, and when he is hidden in an apartment even he  
doesn’t know the exact location of, the book is all he really has, a comfort that still barely feels like his.

Zhenya has never been much of a reader, but the NHL is where Eddie Shore had once been great, in spite of getting pulled away from it constantly. He needs to remember that this is why he belongs there, that this is why his dream can be real.

In the apartment, he gets to the part about Ace Bailey, and it gets harder to read then. Shore revisited the night of the hit on Bailey over and over again. It haunted him constantly, to the point of obsession, to the point where Zhenya almost feels grateful that he has never had anything so awful happen to haunt him that way.

Shore also got pulled away from hockey games, which was awful and intrusive and should’ve cost him his career. That has never happened to Zhenya, either. Reading Shore’s book, Zhenya feels fortunate, privileged, and he _hates_ that. He puts the book down.

If Shore could do this, with those handicaps, Zhenya has no right to be scared. But in the apartment, he is; he barely sleeps, can’t really eat, doesn’t talk much to Barry, who earnestly tries in painful Russian. Shore makes him feel spoiled and weak, ashamed of being scared, that he has waited this long to go after what he wants when Shore never hesitated.

He wants to talk to Denis, but that’s not possible and won’t be possible for a while. He left everything behind, and for once, he can only go forward. It’s a strange and terrifying concept.

Zhenya steels himself and goes, switching apartments without protest, trembling at the thought of _why_ he has to do it this way, and what could be happening to the people he left behind. Denis promised him that they would be okay, that he would watch out, and Barry promises him, too, but it doesn’t quite keep his hands from shaking as he thinks about it.

He dons the baseball cap that Barry’s friends suggest and feels a bit like a criminal going into the U.S. embassy, like he’s going to be stopped or sent away, but nothing happens. His visa is expedited and Barry takes him out for dinner in another discomfiting celebration, Zhenya twitchy and squirrelly, taking hesitant sips of amber-red _sahti_.

“Good,” Barry says approvingly. “Pacing yourself. Long flight tomorrow.” His Russian is garbage but Zhenya hangs on every word like it’s precious; the last good Russian he had heard was at the embassy, a translator who was careful and clinical and did not care half as much as Barry is trying to.

“Excited?” Barry asks, and Zhenya sips his beer and thinks carefully.

“Yes,” he says slowly in English, because it feels easier to lie in English. It has the desired effect of making Barry beam at him, chuckling loudly and ordering him another beer, more herring.

“Good,” Barry says again, and then mangled Russian, and Zhenya tries to smile.

That night, he closes his eyes to fall asleep and when he opens them again, he is not in his bed. He is freezing and naked at a rink, and as always he feels relief, because he is always safe here.

The rink is almost empty, and Zhenya recognizes it immediately as one in Magnitogorsk, crumbling and worn, a place he has always promised to rebuild once he has the money to do it right.

There is a small boy crouched where a net should be, a hockey stick clutched in his hands, and Zhenya recognizes the stick as the one he used to sleep with, especially after he started traveling, because he thought it would keep him in his bed. It didn’t, though.

The boy is fat with winter clothes, breath puffing out in front of him as he swivels back and forth in the crease. Zhenya hugs himself, watches his younger self, and slides back where he knows nobody could see him.

Denis is there, too, and he is complaining. “I can’t feel my hands,” he yells from center ice, aimlessly batting a puck around his feet with a stick, clumsy and tired. “It’s cold, Zhenya, and Mama said only an hour.”

“Just a few more!” young Zhenya says, and Zhenya knows that he doesn’t feel the cold like Denis does. “Please! You can have my dessert.”

“You already owe me your dessert,” Denis says, grumbly, but loud enough that both young and old Zhenya can hear it.

“Tomorrow’s dessert, then,” Zhenya insists, smacking his glove against the ice. “And Monday, too.”

“Fine,” Denis says, and he stills his stick, steadies the puck on the blade, and starts skating slowly forward. His shot is weak, soft and still goes over young Zhenya’s shoulder, who spins in a circle trying to snap it into his glove and then falls on his side, laughing. His parka is crusted with melting, shaved ice.

“Again!” he calls out, and he bats the puck back to Denis, who sighs and takes the shot from closer in this time.

Denis shoots on Zhenya five or six more times, and Zhenya fails to block any, which makes the older Zhenya grin into own shoulder. He is cold; his younger self never felt the cold, but Zhenya feels it now, like Denis, who looks like he wants to throw a temper tantrum over it.

Young Zhenya is down a few more desserts when Denis finally loses his patience and skates the puck all the way over to him. “Switch,” he commands brusquely, and older Zhenya remembers this vaguely, has a faint idea of what will happen next, but his heart pounds anyway.

They switch gloves, Denis’ sliding down Zhenya’s smaller hands and making the grip on his stick look awkward. “Are you sure?” young Zhenya asks. “We never do it like this.”

“If you can get a shot past me, you can win all your dessert back,” Denis says, firm and bossy as he always is. “And we’ll stay for a few more shots. If I stop you, we go home.”

“Deal,” Zhenya says excitedly, and he skates back out to center ice, lining up and staring Denis down with an intensity that older Zhenya still feels in his bones.

He skates forward slowly, careful with the puck on his stick, not as sure as Denis but already a little bit more skilled. He tries a deke, which makes older Zhenya have to stifle an absurd giggle, and then slaps the puck with all his strength, lifting it and sending it sailing toward Denis’ crease.

It slaps neatly into Denis’ glove, shot out catlike and quick, and Zhenya watches his younger self’s shoulders slump. He stops skating, idling on the ice like a tiny car out of gas, and he is not looking up when Denis drops the puck out of his glove and bats it out toward Zhenya with his stick.

“Again.”

“ _Really_?” Zhenya says, his voice high and incredulous. Denis rolls his eyes but nods.

“Really. Until you make it.”

“Why?”

“Because you _can_ , stupid,” Denis says. Older Zhenya has to close his eyes, take a shuddery breath, and when he opens them he is back in his bed in Helsinki, naked and chilled and—

“Excited?” Barry asks again on the way to the airport, squeezing Zhenya’s shoulder a bit.

Zhenya answers in Russian this time, because now he can tell the truth. “Yes. Let’s go to Pittsburgh.”

 

Pittsburgh seems brighter than even Moscow, though logically Zhenya knows that that can’t be true. Barry points out all the bridges, English names that slip from his mind like sand.

“Gonchar’s place first,” Barry says eventually, when Zhenya’s answering hums and grunts die off in exhaustion. “You can nap.”

“Thank you,” Zhenya says, suddenly wide awake. Barry waves at him, shaking his head. “No, _thank you._ You helped me make my dream.”

Barry tilts his head to the side, probably not understanding all of that. Zhenya thinks about trying for English and then just shrugs, reaches out and pats Barry on the shoulder, two heavy claps that make him smile.

Sergei hugs him for a very long time when he opens his front door to let them in. He keeps up a steady stream of exasperated, fond Russian that sounds so good to Zhenya that he feels a bit faint. It is summed up eventually as, “You crazy fucking kid,” and then Ksenia tells him not to swear in front of the baby in her arms.

The Gonchars offer he and Barry food, and Barry politely accepts coffee and looks at Zhenya. “Go rest,” he says kindly. “It’s been hard.”

“We’re invited for dinner later,” Sergei says, but he squeezes the back of Zhenya’s neck and starts guiding him toward the stairs. Zhenya nods numbly, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other instead of thinking to ask _where is dinner_ , until Sergei shows him the suit hanging up on the back of the door to what will be his room from now on. “Mario is very excited to see you. He sent this for you to borrow.”

“Mario,” Zhenya repeats, his tongue thick in his mouth. He tries licking his lips, dropping down on to the foot of his bed in a daze. “Mario Lemieux, we’re invited to dinner with Mario Lemieux.” _In his suit_ he adds a bit hysterically.

“At his house,” Sergei says. He sounds amused. “You’ve met him, Zhenya, do not pretend this is a big drama.”

“Mario Lemieux,” Zhenya says again, and his hand twitches in his lap, thinking of the book tucked into the bag on the floor just by the closet, unfinished.

“Very good,” Sergei tells him, and then he says, “I’ll wake you in a few hours. Sleep well, and.” His face twists a little, perhaps with regret. “Try to stay here, yeah?”

“I always try,” Zhenya says, but he knows Sergei means well, doesn’t know him well enough yet to know how Zhenya clings to the present. Sergei clucks a little, in sympathy or disapproval Zhenya doesn’t know, because he doesn’t really know Sergei well enough, either.

The door shuts gently behind Sergei, and Zhenya takes off his shoes and turns down the covers, too exhausted to look around the room much. He still feels somehow wrong, like something is going to catch up to him and make him pay for his escape, but he is here and he is safe and his family _has_ to be, and this is what he tells himself as he lies down. He drifts off wondering if there will be time for Sergei to translate Mario’s note for him before dinner.

There isn’t time, though; Zhenya oversleeps and has to rush into Mario’s suit, dump water on his hair and comb it furiously until Ksenia catches him at it and produces hair gel for him that he is fairly certain is meant for women. There’s no time to make faces at how badly the suit fits him, or even to hyperventilate over the fact that he’s going to Mario’s house wearing his clothes, of all the ridiculous things to do.

Mario’s house looks more like a castle, stately but somehow homier than the grand, ostentatious mansions of the rich men he knows back home. Sergei says, “Don’t be nervous,” because maybe he can see Zhenya’s hands shaking.

“I’m not nervous,” Zhenya says roughly. “But this is _Mario Lemieux._ ”

“You’re here. You’ve made it. You’re a part of his team, and this is the first step.” Sergei smiles at him. “He is very nice, not scary at all. And Crosby will be there, you’ll have a kid to play with.”

“Crosby,” Zhenya says, huffing a little. He wants to laugh, but that would not help his case in denying his nervousness, and he wants to pinch himself.

“He’s a little weird,” Sergei warns, and he winces a bit to himself. “Just—be patient with him. He’s _very_ excited about you.”

Now Zhenya does laugh, because _Sidney Crosby_ is excited about him. Weird must be an understatement.

It is, and so is the word excited; Crosby shoots down the driveway path barefoot when Sergei pulls the car up. He is beaming at them, waving almost manically before lowering his hand a bit self-consciously, and Zhenya finds himself getting out of the car and shaking Crosby’s sweaty hand more hesitantly than he means to.

Crosby doesn’t care. “Hi!” he says, and then a breathless stream of English that has Zhenya looking to Sergei helplessly for the first time of many that night. Sergei rolls his eyes.

“He says welcome to Pittsburgh, his name is Sidney Crosby—” Sergei breaks off and snaps something at Crosby that makes him blush. “You can call him Sid, or Sidney, he doesn’t care, and I told you he was excited.”

“Jesus Christ,” Zhenya says faintly. Ksenia puts her arm around Sidney’s shoulders and starts guiding him back up the path to the main house, while Barry follows them and good-naturedly elbows Zhenya as he passes him.

Zhenya shakes more hands inside—Mario, which is just crazy, and Nathalie Lemieux, and three small Lemieux children, who mill about and stare at him like he’s a space alien. There is too much English flying around, and it’s a bit overwhelming, like a thick fog blanketing his brain, and he tries to introduce himself as best he can. “Evgeni,” he says, pointing to his chest, though it feels wrong and disingenuous, especially when he remembers he has introduced himself to Mario before in the same way.

Mario and Nathalie both repeat it, for some reason, and they get it a bit wrong, but Sidney says it perfectly, like maybe he had practiced it. _Weird_.

Nathalie tells him through Sergei to make himself comfortable, and he tries, he really does. He lets Sidney guide him into the sitting room with the kids, lets his cheerful, incomprehensible chatter sort of wash over him, but he sits stiffly on the couch, hands folded in his lap until he is a offered a beer, which he takes out of politeness.

The beer is terrible, like drinking liquefied cardboard, and Sidney seems to agree because he doesn’t touch his, just keeps babbling, whether at the kids or Zhenya, he doesn’t know. The kids show Zhenya toys and their TV and keep trying to say “Evgeni,” to get his attention, mangling it charmingly, and then Sidney sits up a little straight, like Zhenya, and says, “Geno.”

He says other stuff, too, but _Geno_ he recognizes from the World Juniors gold medal game, and he stares at Sidney curiously. He wants to ask him—he tries to, actually, and Sidney just looks confused and a little regretful, eyes rapt like he’s hanging on to every word that he can’t possibly understand—and nothing is answered until the boy, Austin, tugs on his sleeve and says, “Geno!” and shows him a video game, and it clicks.

Zhenya points to himself, asks, “Me?” in Russian, and Sidney jumps in and says, “Yes, you,” nodding eagerly. Zhenya is baffled, and it is a relief when Sergei comes in, asking Zhenya if they’re playing nice.

“Why is he calling me _Geno_?” Zhenya asks, and Sergei shrugs and asks Sidney, who answers promptly.

“He says that’s your nickname. Evgeni is too hard for people here to say, and Geno is easy. It’ll be good with the team.” Sergei says something to Sidney that seems fond and teasing, and it makes Sidney shove at him, grinning, and Zhenya _hates_ this, everything going right over his head, until Sergei looks at him and says, “He’s not captain yet, but he thinks he is.”

“I can pick my own nickname,” Zhenya says, but Sergei doesn’t translate that. He just looks at Zhenya flatly.

“Do you think he got to pick Sid the Kid? He has a point, Zhenya. Don’t be a brat.”

“I’m not a _brat_ ,” Zhenya insists, but Sergei ignores him, paying attention to Austin, who has given up on engaging with Zhenya and is shoving his video game at Sergei.

He feels a bit like a brat at dinner, needing to say everything through Sergei or Ksenia, who are ridiculously patient with him. After a while, he stops saying much, because it’s such a pain, but then Mario starts asking him questions through Sergei, kind but firm, and when he leaves off, Sidney jumps in neatly. It is awkward, confusing and wholly necessary, but suddenly the thought of it being like this for a while, that meeting the team and fitting into the team is going to be a long, awful process of miscommunication and translation because of the language barrier, feels like a lump of unhappiness heavy in his stomach. He is so, so behind.

He still feels behind when he says goodbye, unsure for the millionth time that this was the right thing to do. Sidney grabs his hand and shakes it again, holding it with such a surprising strength that Zhenya worries briefly about getting his hand back.

Sidney is smaller than Zhenya had always thought. On the ice he seemed huge, immovable and sturdy, but here he looks like a young boy, and he makes Zhenya feel like one, too.

He lets Zhenya go, telling him things that sound breathless and earnest, though Sergei doesn’t bother translating this time, and he calls him Geno. Zhenya feels annoyed on principle; he doesn’t even know where Geno came from, doesn’t like the sound of it yet, and it feels like just one more thing that doesn’t fit him here.

Mario forgoes another handshake to hug him briefly. His words are translated as, “I am very glad that you’re here,” and Mario’s face is so completely honest that the words linger. Zhenya turns them over in his mind on the drive back to Sergei’s, and when they get there, he runs upstairs for the book Mario sent him and presents it to Sergei.

“The note,” Zhenya says quietly. “Will you translate it for me?”

Barry is gone, Ksenia is relieving the babysitter and getting ready for bed, and Sergei nods easily enough and takes the book. “‘To Evgeni,’” he starts, mispronouncing it on purpose and making Zhenya shove him. “‘Wanted you to have this, so you know what’s possible. Pittsburgh is waiting for you, Sidney Crosby is waiting for you, and I am waiting for you. I think you belong here.’”

Zhenya’s throat feels tight, and he blinks rapidly. He tries to say, “Thank you,” but his voice fails him, and he looks down when he feels Sergei looking at him, can practically hear his thoughts.

“You don’t need me to tell you that you made the right choice,” Sergei says quietly. “Why should you listen to me, anyway? But you’re here now. It will take some time, but everything takes time.” He gently pushes the book back into Zhenya’s hands, standing up when Zhenya takes it. “You’ll figure out where you belong in your own time.”

He only manages to croak out, “Thank you,” when Sergei reaches the door.

 

If Zhenya belongs here, it takes a while for that to become apparent.

The language thing is hard, brutal at times, and Sergei can only make it marginally easier. Sergei swaps out translation duties with a Russian trainer, a kind man named Igor who seems to hover rather protectively at times, eyes crinkling whenever he smiles or frowns. Zhenya tries his best to make the hovering unnecessary; he never felt like such a rookie in the RSL.

In case he ever forgets that’s what he is, Coach Therrien is sure to always remind him. He is firm and severe and most of the team hangs on his every word like gospel. Listening to him, hockey-English becomes an absolute necessity to pick up, and because of that and because of Sidney constantly talking in his ear and pointing and motioning and drawing, he starts picking it up immediately.

Hockey has always been its own language, though, easily translatable and understood even when everything else is swimming in confusion. And Penguins hockey is baffling and exhilarating and an adjustment, but everything is.

Therrien preaches defensive responsibility from the forward core out; offense is generated almost entirely from smooth transitions and on the rush, and Zhenya becomes wary of his own forechecking, incredibly nervous about turnovers. His first misstep with the puck has him cursing in Russian, loud and bright and shocking half the team in one go, and for a second, he is more embarrassed about the outburst than anything else; Therrien doesn’t look amused.

But then Max Talbot laughs and tries to repeat the word, then insists that Sergei tell him what it means. Everyone starts saying it then, calling it out at each other to tease, and their accents are totally shitty except, of course, for Sidney, whose earnest attempts are nearly pitch perfect. Zhenya feels baffled again, and sunnily happy. He grins, and Sidney grins.

They all call him Geno religiously, not even attempting Evgeni or bothering with Malkin or any other nickname. Zhenya almost feels like he’s getting off easy; most of the other nicknames on the team are references he doesn’t understand (Sergei laughs heartily when he asks what a “Gronk” is, and then eventually admits he doesn’t know. “But doesn’t he just look like a Gronk?”), or alterations to given names. He supposes that “Geno” is an alteration to his name, in a twisted way. Sidney has still never explained the logic of it.

Sidney is a Therrien disciple. He is dutiful and diligent about following instructions in a way that Zhenya hadn’t expected of him. He had always pictured a cocksure, confident guy, used to getting his way and voracious about doing anything he could to get it, but Sidney doesn’t seem to have an ego that Zhenya can detect.

He deals with Zhenya’s clumsy transition to wing with a grace that even Zhenya can’t manage. “Coach,” he says to Zhenya, and then clumps of English, the confidence that Zhenya had expected shining through every word, but a different kind of confidence. This is confidence in their team, and their coach, and possibly Zhenya himself. It takes a couple of days, but Zhenya eventually realizes that Penguins hockey is something that Sidney Crosby believes in wholeheartedly, and he wants Zhenya on board with it.

Zhenya tries to get on board as fast as he can, but there is a near-devastating setback in the preseason. He collides with Leclair during an exhibition game against Philadelphia, and his shoulder is twinging, but not seriously. He’s sure he’ll be fine, at first.

He is taken out of the game anyway, examined careful by trainers, and gets a visit from a snarling Sidney during intermission. “Fucking Flyers,” he says.

Zhenya quietly points out that it was friendly fire, but Sidney can’t understand him. This time, he doesn’t even pretend to be listening to Zhenya in spite of that, but waves him off and paces, telling a story in English that Igor eventually translates as the story of how Sidney lost his front teeth to the Flyers in the stupid preseason.

“He’s being dramatic,” Igor says. “They were just broken, he just got them capped. He’s still a pretty boy.”

“What,” Sidney yells, and Zhenya laughs at them both.

He is still laughing when he blinks and appears somewhere else, in another time.

He is in a small, slightly shabby apartment that he recognizes in a few disorienting moments as the one that he had lived in with his family until he was five. The apartment is empty at first sight, until Zhenya clamps his mouth shut, swallows down the fleeting, bubbly happiness that had been rising inside of him, and goes looking for his father’s clothes.

Instead, he finds Mama—younger than he has ever known her, young enough that the baby she is visibly carrying has to be Denis. She is in the kitchen, chopping vegetables with the radio on, and Zhenya tries to be quiet, but winces when he steps on a weak floorboard, creaking it loudly.

Mama whirls around, gasps, and quickly grows furious.

“I’m sorry about that,” Mama told him once, rubbing his shoulder with two strong hands. “I hit you, Zhenya. I didn’t know.” She furrowed her brow, pulling out the complicated threads of time that Zhenya has made a life of unraveling. “It hasn’t happened for you yet, so be careful. I came at you with the big pan, the heavy one we used for sauces.” She said sorry a lot, angry that she didn’t know her own son. Zhenya could never hold it against her.

So Zhenya is ready for it, throws his hands up and tries to duck out of Mama’s way. He doesn’t, though, and part of it is knowing that he won’t; it happened in Mama’s reality and therefore has to happen in his. Zhenya is never allowed to change anything, not that he ever wants to. That was always Eddie Shore’s biggest regret.

The pan comes down on his shoulder with a heavy, bruising force. Mama has always been the strongest person he’s ever known.

He barely makes it out of the apartment—down the freezing hallway, his shoulder on fire, a giant pulsing hurt that stings more than any hockey injury ever could. Mama is still screaming at him from the apartment, yelling about the police, her husband, and Zhenya just runs, down a stairwell, and another, and yet a few more, until he can barely breathe and can’t move his arm and he is in the boiler room in which he and Denis had played hide and seek.

It should be warm in there but isn’t. Zhenya hugs himself as much as his shoulder will allow and catches his breath, waits. Hearing this story from Mama, even from her tortured, guilty voice, it had always seemed funny, and maybe there will come a time when it seems funny again, but right now he can’t even imagine that.

His breath slows down and grows steadier after a while, until all he can concentrate on is the cold and the pain in his shoulder and the waiting. Zhenya has always, always hated the waiting, and he feels like a small child again, jumpy and listening for the sounds of someone coming to find him. When he was younger, he never felt the cold.

Hours pass before he goes back, his head bowed. Zhenya knows immediately upon returning to the exam room that the Moncton, New Brunswick host facility had mostly emptied, the game had ended, and hours have passed here, too.

It’s a shock, then, when someone yells, “Geno!” and leaps at him where he’s back to perching on the exam table. Zhenya has to shake his head and remember, yes, he is Geno. It’s still not comfortable to answer to that.

Sidney appears in front of his swimming vision, out of his gear and uniform, wide-eyed. He bursts out with a long stream of English, then finally slows down and carefully asks, “Okay? Good?”

Zhenya is mystified, but he slowly shakes his head, points to his shoulder with his good hand, and Sidney starts hollering out the door at the top of his lungs. The room quickly fills: Therrien and all the trainers and Sergei and Max and Erik and Army, until Therrien rounds on everyone and bellows at them until they leave, and Zhenya hazily thinks that it’s no wonder he and Sidney get along.

Sidney stays, though, and Sergei and Igor, and Therrien surveys him carefully, pats his good arm, and follows his players out. He doesn’t even try telling Sidney to go with him.

“My shoulder,” Zhenya tells Igor, exhaustion and cold and pain all starting to catch up to him as spots dance in front of his eyes. Igor shushes him and helps him into clothes, and underneath everything, Zhenya is wretchedly embarrassed. He is even more embarrassed when he asks, “You waited?” but it’s a valid question; the clock on the wall tells him their plane to Pittsburgh should’ve left at least an hour ago.

Igor and Sergei both look aghast, and Sergei is so disgusted that he must translate for Sidney, who opens his mouth like he’s going to start hollering again. As Zhenya lies carefully back on the table and starts drifting off, the last thing he can understand is Sidney firmly, ruthlessly insisting, “ _Yes_ , yes, _waited._ ”

 

The official story is that he dislocated his shoulder during the collision with Leclair. The only people who get the real story are Therrien, Sergei, Shero and Mario, because it’s embarrassing and awful and he can’t imagine what everyone else would think of him.

“Sid knows you got injured in the past,” Sergei tells him over dinner one night, and Zhenya groans and puts his face in his hands. “Relax. He doesn’t know it was your mother. He wouldn’t care, though, he’s just concerned.”

“I think I’d prefer it if he’d laugh,” Zhenya says darkly, because Sidney kind of—he _hovers_ , and it’s odd. For as awkward as he is with strangers, Sidney treats Zhenya with more familiarity than anyone outside of his family ever has, and once again, weird is an understatement.

“He means well,” Sergei says, which is what he always says. Zhenya just shakes his head and changes the subject, because he feels as though he talks about Sidney way more than is necessary.

Both the official story and the real story mean the same thing: Zhenya is on the shelf to start the season. Nobody is more upset about this than him, except for possibly Sidney. After everything he had gone through, everything he had worked for, something so stupid had knocked him out and is making him wait. Zhenya still hates waiting.

He watches the Penguins play through much of October, and his shoulder heals fast enough considering the mess of tissue damage it had been, but he feels like a dog finally let out of its cage when he is cleared to play.

Zhenya and Sidney pause over rituals. One of the Crosby Warnings that Sergei and other teammates had given him was that Sidney is entrenched in rituals and superstition, and tends to get really bent out of shape if they get messed with. Zhenya had been happy to hear this, because he has rituals, too, and he likes having something in common with Sidney, no matter how weird or overly, unsettlingly comfortable Sidney is with him.

That changes a bit when Sidney waits at the door to the locker room for Zhenya to troop out, and Zhenya waits too. “Oh no,” he says, and then under his breath, “Fuck.”

“Fuck,” Zhenya agrees, feeling a little helpless, and a lot stubborn. This is Sidney’s team, it’s felt that way since Zhenya got here, but this—walking out last is a huge part of hockey for him. It is one of the only parts he can take with him from home.

“Are you two coming or what?” Sergei calls in two different languages, and they both look at him pleadingly. “For Christ’s sake, what’s the matter?”

“I always go out last,” Zhenya says, at the same time Sidney spews English that is almost certainly the same words, because Sergei just starts laughing at them. Sidney says something else, and Sergei is grinning and shaking his head when he translates.

“He asked if you want to do rock-paper-scissors. It’s like a game where you—never mind, you won’t learn it fast enough. Just tell him no.”

Sidney is staring at him wide-eyed, clearly anxious, and at the same that Zhenya wants to just appease him, he also wants to reason with him, as best that he can. He thinks that Sidney will appreciate that more. Zhenya points to himself, makes careful eye contact, and just as carefully says, “Me three years Superleague.”

“What,” Sidney says blankly, and Sergei must explain, because he nods slowly and adds, “Oh.” Then he talks to Sergei, who laughingly translates.

“You’re pulling rank on him? Here?”

“Yes,” Zhenya says firmly and clearly. Sidney looks thoughtful again, biting his bottom lip, and then his face kind of brightens and he speaks to Sergei.

“He has an idea,” Sergei says. He rolls his eyes and backs off, and Zhenya feels a ridiculous swoop of panic as he goes, especially when Sidney tucks his stick under an armpit and reaches forward.

Zhenya fights not to flinch away, but Sidney just grabs one of his gloved hands and folds it into a fist. He then bumps their fists together clumsily, looking like he’s concentrating very hard, and looks up into Zhenya’s eyes intently, before speaking very slowly. “We do this now. Okay, Geno?”

It takes a while for Zhenya to get it, to bump his fist back and remember that he is Geno again, and to figure out what Sidney’s doing. When he does, he feels a bit warm, and he knocks their fists together one more time, taps the front of Sidney’s chest right across the Penguins logo, and then leans down to knock their helmets together lightly.

“Okay.”

Sidney’s smile is huge and violently joyful, and it leaves Zhenya a little shell-shocked as Sidney turns and starts toward the runway again. It takes him a second to follow.

And then he plays hockey. In some ways, it’s just like the hockey he’s always played; he has the same abilities, the same strength and the same skills, but it’s—it’s _harder._ Nobody makes it easy on him; he is swarmed, pushed, shoved, thrown, elbowed. Everything hurts, and everything’s fast, and the time Zhenya spends on the ice is the best time of his life, hands down.

Nothing compares to the feeling of his first goal, dirty and pushed in under Martin Brodeur, the kind of garbage goal that wouldn’t impress anyone back home. But Zhenya is elated. He feels more alive and more satisfied then he ever has, and when Sidney grabs him into a hug with Rex at his back, it doesn’t feel odd or strange or too familiar anymore. It feels right.

Zhenya keeps scoring goals. He feels like an addict, hungry for the Pittsburgh crowd and Sidney’s smiles and Therrien’s hand shaking him by the shoulder on the bench, muttering what has to be praise in French.

This is the hockey he was always meant to play. Hockey is everything for him, it’s his anchor and his purpose, and Zhenya knows now that this hockey with the Penguins is what he was made for. That realization is one of the most important of his life, and it is truly hammered home when he scores in his fourth straight game, joyously barreling through the Devils’ defense and snapping the puck at the abandoned half of the net on his backhand.

He can feel the roar of the crowd vibrating through him, his bones tingling with the notion that he just did something _great_ , something powerful. Zhenya remembers watching Mario Lemieux score in ways he could never even imagine, and suddenly he can imagine them. He has never felt so huge.

Sidney barrels into him at full tilt, screaming his head off and flying into Zhenya’s arms, and Zhenya holds him tight, his heart pounding as they’re swarmed further. Everyone is yelling “Geno!” at him, and it’s finally instinctual to answer to it, to know that he is Geno. Crushed under his teammates, crushing Sidney to him and feeling his voice rumble through his chest, Zhenya sucks in a deep breath and then lets it out slowly.

This is what Geno does.

 

The team goes out to eat and drink when they officially make the Stanley Cup Finals. Geno splits a cab with Bugsy, Max and Flower, following a cab that contains what seems like the entirety of the team crammed in together, and going by the shadows of heads Geno can make out through the tint of the rear windshield, he thinks that Sidney is sitting in Jordy’s lap. Geno grins.

Sidney has the look of a disgruntled cat when they all converge in front of the steakhouse, fixing his clothes prissily even though his jacket is, as always, too long on him. Geno grins harder at him and fixes his collar, catching Jordy’s eye and winking before Sidney huffs and knocks his hands away.

“I got it, thanks. Dick.”

“Captain needs be happy for team,” Geno says, gesturing around as they wait for the final cab. “No grump.”

“I’m not grumpy,” Sidney says, and that’s Jordy’s cue to come over and sling his arms around Sidney’s shoulders, leaning way down to grin into the side of his head. Geno realizes that there is a distinct possibility that the first cab had done some pregaming en route, which makes sense; Robs had been in that cab, too.

“Why should you be grumpy? I can’t feel my _legs_ thanks to your giant ass,” Jordy says, and he tries to put all his weight on Sidney, who groans and tries to drop him. Jordy clings, though, and the ensuing wrestling match ends with Sidney’s tie askew and his hair sticking up in tufts. Geno laughs heartily, and keeps laughing as Sidney glares.

Sidney’s grumpiness doesn’t last, not in the face of giant steaks and pitchers of beer that Robs warns them all against, wisely spouting off, “Beer before liquor, never sicker. Liquor before beer, you’re in the clear.”

“Can it, Scary, we’ll worry about being sick tomorrow,” Bugsy yells, and that sounds fine to Geno. Worrying about anything right at this moment feels impossible.

They get blitzed, every one of them, starting from the steakhouse, then a bar, then a brief foray into a nightclub that only Tanger, Flower and Max truly enjoy, then two more bars. They end the night tasting scotch in an old man bar that’s near to closing, falling all over each other and laughing at everything.

The booths aren’t big enough for all of them to sit together, so Geno is wedged between Max and Sergei, trying to follow a boisterous conversation led by Scuds. English is hard when he’s this drunk, though it has gotten so much easier in general. There are places where he gets self-conscious, people he talks to who make him feel dumb, even unintentionally, but none of that happens with the team.

He feels like he’s just gotten the gist of where the conversation is going when he blinks and it falls away. Geno’s head spins, and for a second it is impossible to tell where he’s landed—he goes to his knees and registers hard, cold concrete, sending a shiver through his skin.

He doesn’t get drunk much, and situations like this remind him exactly why. For a second, Geno just tries to concentrate on not throwing up, fear swooping amply through his gut, but then he hears, “Hey, mister!” and he knows he has to start moving. He’s naked, like always, and naked outside is a problem, especially where there are people, no matter what time he’s gone to. Geno gets up with some difficulty and starts to run.

While running, he starts trying to figure out where he is. The voice had spoken in English, and sounded like a young girl; kids are always easier to run into than adults, but the problem is that kids usually have parents who don’t appreciate a strange, naked man around him.

He’s in a cold place. Geno feels the cold acutely, can registers the stretch of slate gray sky above him and he lets it sober him as he runs, his vision continuing to swim, his stomach rolling. He turns off the street he’d been on and is confronted with a busier street, and that makes him want to vomit again. There are so many people, staring at him, bundled up, and he is naked. He has to get off the street.

It takes more running, and then finally some familiar sights: bridges in bunches, and the Tenth Street Bridge glaringly yellow and promising. Geno tries to figure out which side he’s on just by sight, to orient himself and try to picture Pittsburgh from the inside of a car, the way he knows it best right now. If he’s on the right side, he’s not far from a safe place, and indeed, it’s not that far of a walk to the Igloo.

Geno has never had to do so much to find his way to a hockey arena, and it’s a little disheartening when he sees that the place is closed. There is a security guard dozing in a booth in the parking lot, but he is easy enough to avoid, and no alarms blare when Geno uses a rock to break in, letting himself in and trying not to feel guilty.

The Igloo is eerily quiet and still; Geno rubs his hands up and down his arms and tries to just get warm inside, looking around for signs of time. It looks nothing like the arena he knows. The only familiar sight he finds is the ice, but even when he squints in at center, the logo is different. Older.

On the concourse, so simple and trimmed-down compared to what Geno knows, he finds a banner welcoming the Penguins, and welcoming the Pittsburgh fans. It doesn’t say _welcome back_ , which Geno understands as them returning, but simply _welcome._ He looks back at the ice, fresh and new, and wonders if it has ever been skated on.

He wanders around the arena more—breaks into the locker room and tries to decipher the names he sees. He only recognizes a few names: Bathgate and Schinkel, and others that vaguely ring a bell, but so many more that are guiltily mysterious. He tries to memorize as many as he can, so that when he gets back he can ask, and he spends enough time with the names to slowly understand what they make up. Here, Geno is confronted with a team of leftovers, minor-leaguers to fill out a roster, NHL players that the Original Six deemed expendable. This is how Geno’s team started.

It’s almost a surprise to go back to the bar after a while. Not so surprisingly, the bar has cleared out and gone totally dark, and at first Geno is sure that it’s completely empty. The team likes to wait for him when they can, but they were all so drunk, and Geno can never hold it against them. He would hate waiting if it were reversed, he thinks. Waiting always drives him crazy.

He looks around for his clothes, stumbling a bit in the dark, and then a car goes by and headlights flash through the window. For a second, one of the booths that the Penguins had been squeezed into is illuminated, and Geno sighs heavily, because Sidney is curled up on the seat, Geno’s suit jacket draped over him like a blanket, the rest of Geno’s clothes bunched under his head like a pillow.

“Sid,” Geno says, and his eyes adjust to the darkness until he can feel his way over, and start to see the outline of Sidney’s body without the light from outside, a small, stupid lump under the jacket. “Sidney, wake up. Back.”

“Plants,” Sidney says, clear as day, and then he sits up abruptly, one arm going out in front of him and making Geno stagger back a little to avoid getting hit. A car passes once more, and the faintest, lavender hints of daylight are starting to filter inside, so Geno is confronted with Sidney’s scrunched up, hazy face, still wasted. Geno envies him a bit; he is depressingly sober, and also naked.

“Hi Sid. You wait?”

“What? Geno? Where are the plants—ugh.” Sidney rubs at his eyes and then tries to focus them on Geno, blinking rapidly. “Oh, you’re back. Is it time for practice?”

“No,” Geno says patiently. “Have day off. We go home now.”

“Okay.” Sidney starts dropping his head back down, eyes fluttering closed, and Geno swears and pulls his bundle of clothes away, cupping Sidney’s head when he keeps going anyway.

“No Sidney. Up now, up.”

“ _Geno_.”

He gives Sidney the time to doze until he’s dressed. Geno’s clothes are warm from Sidney’s head, and his jacket—when he manages to pry it from Sidney’s stubbornly clenched hands—is even warmer, and Geno hugs it tight around him and starts hunting for his shoes. When he’s as put together as he’d been before his trip to the past, he crouches down next to the seat of the booth and pats Sidney’s cheek until he swats at him and wakes up again.

After that, it’s still a chore to get Sidney on his feet and then to find _his_ shoes when he discovers Sidney’s in his socks. Sidney asks him a few more questions about plants, and about practice, and Geno gives noncommittal answers until they’re both as presentable as they’re going to be. He hauls Sidney up, pats the side of his face until he looks a bit more alert, and starts walking them both outside.

The sky is misty and pinking up, and when Geno looks at Sidney’s watch it’s a little after six. There are no cabs around but Geno gambles and walks them along for a bit, feeling relieved when he sees one idling at the next big intersection. He waves it over, pops open the back door, and shoves Sidney inside, keeping a hand on his neck to make sure he doesn’t bump his head.

He gives Sidney’s address first, suddenly too tired to figure out if that makes geographical sense; he doubts Sidney could get into Mario’s guesthouse on his own, anyway. Indeed, Sidney curls up and starts dozing off as soon as the cab starts moving, but this time instead of on Geno’s clothes, it’s on Geno. Geno sighs again but puts his arm around Sidney, his head a heavy, comforting weight against his chest. He’s so warm, and however ridiculous it is that Sidney always waits for him to come back even when the rest of the team doesn’t, Geno always likes how warm he is.

Sidney startles awake when the cab stops short for a red light, blinking up at Geno with his face pink and creased from Geno’s jacket. Geno smiles at him, squeezes his shoulders, and prepares to reassure him that they don’t have practice, but Sidney says, “You’re back,” a little wondrously, and Geno nods instead.

“Yes. Thank you for wait. Don’t have to.”

“I don’t mind,” Sidney says, yawning and putting his head back a little hesitantly. Geno squeezes him closer and closes his own eyes, leaning his head back and trying to calculate how many hours of sleep he can grab this morning without fucking up his sleep cycle completely.

After a few moments of comfortable, early morning silence, Sidney mumbles, “Where’d you go?”

Sidney asks him every time, even when he’s only heard that Geno had traveled somewhere when he couldn’t be around to wait for him. It’s not always easy for Geno to explain, and even now the words feel difficult, heavier than most English and thick in his mouth. But Sidney is never going to stop asking, Geno has resigned himself to that, just like it appears that he’s never going to stop waiting. Almost two years ago, this would feel disconcerting, uncomfortable, but now—now it’s a part of the time travel routine, and Geno hasn’t had the chances for many routines around time travel to develop.

“I go Pittsburgh,” Geno says quietly, and he feels Sidney’s smile through his shirt. “Igloo when—new for Penguins.”

“New for Penguins,” Sidney repeats thickly, as slow as Geno feels. And then he stiffens a bit, looking up with light in his eyes that echoes the sunrise around them. “ _New_? Like when the team was new?”

“Yes. First Penguins. See their names.” Slowly and carefully, he gives Sidney some names. He tells him what the arena looked like, how easy it had been to break in, how still and empty everything felt. Sidney is quiet, but he’s practically vibrating against Geno, and somehow he can feel him listening to every word.

It’s startling when the cab rolls to a stop, and both Geno and Sidney sit up a little straighter and blink out at Mario’s front gates.

“Wait here,” Geno tells the cab driver, and he opens the back door and looks at Sidney. “I walk you up.”

“Okay,” Sidney says, and it’s a good call; Sidney is wobbly, giggling when he stumbles on the curb. Geno rolls his eyes and smiles helplessly, taking Sidney by the arm and waiting for him to finish keying them into the gate.

Geno keeps a hold of Sidney all the way up to the guest house, and he helps him unlock the door and push it open. He pulls back, then, thinking wistfully about his own bed, telling Sidney to get some more sleep, but Sidney stops him from walking off completely, reaching out and grabbing him by the arm.

“Hey, Geno,” Sidney says, licking his lips. He sways into the doorframe a little and Geno steps in closer on instinct, reaching out to steady him, narrowing his eyes when Sidney makes eye contact. “Hey, we—we have to win one more in Mellon, okay? We’ve gotta do it. Maybe more than one, maybe—maybe three. Right? We have three more shots until the new arena.”

“Okay,” Geno says, because he’s not going to argue against three more Cups. They can do it. They’re so close right now, so much farther than they’ve gone in years, and it’s—Sidney is still weird and still overly familiar and still goes down a bit easier than any guy on legs as strong as his should, but he also makes three Cups in three years sound entirely possible to Geno. He’s kind of magic like that.

“We can do it,” Sidney says. He’s still drunk from last night but he means every word, Geno is sure of that; the drunk part is pulling Geno in more, grabbing on to him and keeping him close, but Geno lets himself get drawn in pretty easy for someone acting as the sober one here. That’s Sidney’s magic, too. “We’re not leftovers anymore. We’re here for this team, we’re gonna win for this team.”

“Yes,” Geno says, nodding for good measure. Sidney nods too, and tugs him in ever closer, and Geno’s expecting a hug: he raises his arms to put them around Sidney, happy with a hug, because Sidney gives really good hugs almost inexplicably.

It’s not a hug, though. Sidney pushes up off the doorframe and puts his mouth on Geno’s, kissing him firmly for about 12 seconds in which Geno remains frozen, shocked, and wondering just how sober he actually is. Then Geno jerks back, and Sidney wobbles dangerously. Geno catches him on instinct, because his arms are already there—he wanted a _hug_ —but keeps a good amount of distance between them, propping Sidney up against the doorframe and staring at him with his mouth open.

“Okay,” Geno says eventually. He lets Sidney go, watches him for a moment just to make sure he doesn’t fall, and then stumbles back down to the front gates. His head is spinning again, though every part of him feels very warm.

He is still warm when he creeps into the house, avoiding the creaky step on the way up to his room and very quietly closing the door after him. The house will be up in an hour or so, and Geno plans to let it wake up without him; the past had done away with his hangover, at least, but he is deeply tired, and his head is still spinning a little, like he had never been able to set it right again.

He stays quiet in undressing, stifling a groan when he sees that Oksana is spread across the bed in the way that tells Geno she’d probably have pushed him off if he’d been sleeping there. Her head is on Geno’s pillow and the rest of her is diagonal, spread into her usual side, and her hair is sticking up a little in the band of her eye mask. There’s no way he can get into bed with waking her.

She makes it easy for him in the end, mumbling a little and then sighing out, “Zhenya?” when he knocks into his dresser on the way back from the bathroom. Geno curses silently but climbs onto the biggest slice of bed available, fitting his arms around her and rolling her gently to one side. Oksana grumbles a little but fits her hand over his where he’s holding her hip, and she sighs again.

“Go back to sleep,” Geno says, kissing the back of her head lightly and arranging the covers over them evenly. “It’s still early.”

“Time is it?”

“Early. Barely daytime. Sleep.”

“Have a good night?” Oksana asks a little absently, and Geno thinks about it and eventually nods into her hair.

“Yes. You should come next time.” He is pointedly _not_ thinking about Sidney when he says this, or about the likelihood that Sidney would still have been the one waiting for him in the bar, had Oksana gone out with them or not, but his mind goes there in an instant, and guilt—ill-placed, unwanted—starts creeping in beneath his skin.

“I am. I’m going to dinner tomorrow night, remember?” Oksana stretches a little, pointing her toes and then tucking her feet in against his shins. Geno remembers, thinks, and feels more than guilt prick at him as he thinks of Sidney at the same dinner as Oksana, after—“I have to go,” Oksana says. Her voice is deep and sleepy and dear to him, and he kisses her hair once more. “Maxime owes me two beers, we had a bet—”

“Sidney kissed me,” Geno says all in a rush. Oksana understandably goes quiet, stiffening against him, and he can’t help but add, “Like twenty minutes ago.”

“What?” Oksana says sharply, sitting up and pulling her eye mask off. Her eyes are puffy and sleepy with no makeup, but they are narrowed to slits and suddenly sharp as knives, and Geno wants to close his—he wants to sleep and he wants to travel back in time to five seconds ago and not say anything as stupid as what he’d just said.

“He was very drunk,” Geno explains, trying to keep his voice even. “I think he was confused.” He had once watched Sidney climb into Army’s lap and kiss him on a dare, and at the time it had been hilarious. They were on the road and drinking in Max’s room and all the French Canadians were kissing each other on dares anyway; it had been easy to get Sidney involved. “That’s how they do it in the Q,” Sergei told Geno darkly, and then he must’ve said that in English, too, because everyone agreed heartily and laughingly until Army sputtered, “Then leave me out of it, God,” and shoved Sidney off him.

Now, it is slightly less hilarious. It actually makes Geno blush to think about, in a way that makes him wish Oksana still had her eye mask on.

“Confused,” Oksana repeats skeptically, sitting up a little straighter. “Did he confuse your lips for a water bottle? Now I’m confused.”

“It was nothing,” Geno says, working hard to make it sound like he’s not just hoping that. He’s hoping that he means it.

“If it was nothing, why did you tell me?” Oksana says, one perfectly shaped eyebrow arched. For a second, Geno wishes that Oksana was half the stupid, vapid girl his mother still thinks she is.

“Because I thought you should know. In case he acts like—” Geno thinks about it for a second, considering how awful and wonderful Sidney can be in turns during any situation that’s mildly uncomfortable, and then shrugs. “Like Sid. You know him a little bit now. I’m sure he was just drunk, and it was nothing.”

Oksana climbs on top of him, shifting her weight down in a way that makes him bite down on a puffed up breath. The covers go with her and create an open arc in which cool morning air filters in on them. Geno shivers and fits his hands firmly at her hips once more, looking up at her apprehensively.

“Nothing,” Oksana repeats, and her mouth tilts like she’s amused, but her tone is anything but. “I know Sid. I don’t know how he kisses, though. Was it good?”

“No!” Geno says. The terribly stupid voice that has lived in his head since puberty at least pipes up with a meek, “Well, it wasn’t _bad_ ,” but Geno is an expert at silencing that voice. “It was _nothing._ ”

“Sidney Crosby kissed you in the middle of the playoffs and it was nothing,” Oksana says, raising her eyebrow again. “We both said that I know Sid.”

“Right,” Geno says, and he bites his bottom lip. “I’ll—I’ll talk to him?”

“Yes. Or I will.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Geno says hastily. Oksana nods firmly, then leans down and kisses him just as firmly. It lasts longer than the kiss with Sidney, as well it should, though Oksana comes up again with a wrinkled nose.

“You need to brush your teeth. You taste like a Canadian.”

“You’re crazy,” Geno tells her, and his laughter is only a little nervous when she slaps him on the chest. “I need to _sleep._ Sleep with me, we’ll sleep the whole day.”

Oksana tilts her head back, thinking about it, before she shakes her head and starts climbing off him, prying off his fingers one by one when he clamps on to her hips. “No, I don’t think so.”

She leaves the bed, and Geno sighs watching her go. He tries curling up in the warmth she’d left but it’s already gone cold. Oksana takes up so much space that her warmth is spread out instead of concentrated, and it fades faster. Geno tugs the covers tightly around him.

 

Geno means to talk to Sidney, but the dinner with all the wives and the girlfriends and the bachelors (a group that Sidney proudly represents) goes so well that Oksana tells him, “Good job with that talk,” and never brings it up again.

She also trips Sidney on the way to the bathroom and apologizes so profusely that no one could ever accuse her of doing it on purpose; Geno only knows because he’s been in love with her cruelty for quite a while. He is glad to have the matter solved, in the sense that Sidney seems eager to completely ignore it outside of bewildered, frightened glances at Oksana every so often. He can focus on the good of what had come out of that morning, the solid promise and belief that Sidney had instilled with firm earnestness, before the small mess with the kiss.

In the end, another Cup is won in the Igloo, but it is not won by the Penguins. The grind of the Finals and the blanketing hopelessness of losing is enough to smother all thoughts of the kiss, making them seem trivial and ridiculous. When they lose, Geno is too sad to feel anything else.

Therrien talks about how far they had come, which he had talked about last year, too, when Ottawa knocked them out. It means so much less right now, not even remotely penetrating the heavy, awful fog of despair and disappointment hovering over him. After the loss, the moments that Geno has to spend in the locker room are the only moments that Geno has ever wanted to travel back in time, and he wishes he could do it on purpose. He wants to be in any moment but this one.

Now that they have officially lost in the Stanley Cup Finals, the team takes it upon themselves to get wasted again. Geno doesn’t join them, instead choosing to go back to Sergei’s with his family, Mama’s hand reaching all the way up to rub the back of his neck, Oksana’s hand cold and dry in his. They are refraining from hissing like cats at each other, which is the norm, and Geno is grateful.

Outside of that small concession, his family works hard to make everything seem normal. Mama has been cooking nonstop since she’s been here, making grumbly noises about Oksana’s lack of help, and there is a big meal just waiting to be heated up.

Geno eats because Mama would swat him on the back of the head if he didn’t. His playoff thinness rankles her like nothing else, and though Mama is, in his opinion, the best cook in the world, everything tastes like cardboard.

After dinner, they all have drinks and talk about nothing. Sergei is as quiet as Geno, only managing to crack any sort of smile when Natalie climbs into his lap and pats at his face. They put on the TV but no one watches it. For a long time, it feels as though they are just waiting to all go to bed, as if Geno and Sergei are keeping them there, and it’s Geno who finally stands up and starts saying goodnight.

Oksana strips in the bedroom and doesn’t put clothes back on, and Geno feels a little helpless in the face of her nakedness, a little useless. Her upper lip starts to curl the longer he just considers her, looking at her, and it is enough to spur him into action, to pull her to him and kiss her and slip his hand between her legs.

He fucks her harder than he would on a better day, and he can’t help imagining how this would be if they won. They would be drunk, he thinks. Oksana would taste like champagne, her hands would be soft against his face and her cunt would feel like a reward instead of a consolation prize.

She gets herself off on top of him once he’s done, and Geno’s back to just watching her, vision pricking on the hints of derision he finds in her face, the sense of duty he knows is there. She is a good girlfriend no matter what his mother says, and she knows as well as he does that if he wanted true comfort, she is not the right place to look for it. Geno doesn’t want comfort, though. He is too angry with himself.

“This still works,” Oksana says when she settles down next to him, already collected. She holds his soft dick and smirks at him just a little, as much as she thinks he can take. “See? You’re still Zhenya.”

Geno grunts and shifts so she will let him go. He buries his face in his pillow and tells himself to go to sleep, but he is still telling himself that when Oksana showers, returns to bed dressed, and slips her eye mask on. She falls asleep quickly and easily, and Geno stares at the far wall.

It feels like hours, and when he checks the clock on his phone he sees that a few have gone by with no hints of sleep. He is wide, wide awake when he hears the honking outside of the house, the shouts and catcalls that draw him to the window just in time to see a black SUV peel away from the curb, the tires squealing.

Geno grabs for boxers as soon as he notices the slumped figure making its way determinedly up Sergei’s front walkway. There’s not enough light to make the figure out, but Geno can make a foreboding guess, and he hurries downstairs before Sidney can wake up any of the other people in the house.

Sidney has his hand raised to knock when Geno wrenches the door open and stares at him. Sidney’s eyes are red-rimmed and his nose is running and for a second, the way he keeps his hand raised, balled into a fist, makes Geno think he’s going to punch him. Geno braces himself for it and purses his lips, but Sidney just drops his hand and swallows hard, leaning against the doorframe.

It couldn’t be a more terrible mirror to that morning. Sidney smells drunker somehow, smothered in misery, his mouth an unhappy curve across his face and every line of his body slumped in defeat.

For a second, Geno thinks to be nervous. The kiss is in the back of his mind, and he thinks he might be the one to punch Sidney if he tries anything like that again right now. But the more he looks at Sidney, the more he knows that anything like that won’t happen, can’t right now. Sidney’s eyes are hard and dark and angry, and his hands are still balled into fists at his sides.

“What you—” Geno starts bravely, and Sidney cuts him off, snarling.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Geno blinks. “Tell what?”

“You—why didn’t you tell me that we lost? Why did you let me think—I thought we could do it, Geno. Why the fuck didn’t you say anything?”

The rush of annoyance that wells up in him is not entirely surprising. “How I know? Don’t go to future, don’t know—”

“But you _knew_!” Sidney says, loud enough that Geno instinctively looks behind him and tries shuffling Sidney a bit further out onto Sergei’s front porch. Sidney doesn’t budge, though, steeling himself, resulting in Geno just too close, close enough to feel Sidney radiating heat.

“Not know. You drunk, Talbot get you—”

“You did know. You knew when I was a kid and you wouldn’t—you said you wouldn’t cheat, and you _lied_ to me, you told me that I was the best in the world and—how could you do that to me? Why did you lie like that?”

Sidney’s breathing sounds a little wet, and that makes Geno feel horrified and a little nauseous. He is turning Sidney’s words over in his head, trying to make sense of the English words tripping over each other and blurring up, but none of it makes sense. He is missing something more essential than English in this concentration, and he debates the merits of forcing Sidney to clarify when he’s this drunk.

He has to, though. “Not understand. When you—kid?”

“I was seven,” Sidney says. “You were 23, so you—you knew we were gonna lose and you didn’t _tell me_.”

It starts to come together slowly, in wisps and stops and starts, something vague and ill-formed. Geno takes a few minutes to just try and work it out mentally, his head starting to pound, as Sidney lets out wet breaths and wipes at his nose angrily. “I—I see you. When you seven. I travel?”

“Yes.” Geno’s back immediately goes up at Sidney’s frustrated, accusatory tone, because he didn’t know—he doesn’t know about any of this, and Sidney has been his teammate for almost two years now and never bothered to tell him. He wants to start railing on Sidney about that, wants to let loose with all of the anger that’s been bubbling under his skin since the final buzzer sounded, but then Sidney says, “You ruined my life, my whole childhood was—you lied to me, Geno.”

Geno deflates. There is something horribly heartbroken in Sidney’s voice, the same kind of despair that matches what Geno feels right now, but it sounds older, somehow. Not for the first time since Geno has known him, Sidney sounds both very, very young and very, very old, and it hits Geno somewhere very tender.

“Sorry,” Geno says, feeling a little incredulous that he actually means it. “I—sorry. Not 23 yet.”

Sidney closes his eyes tightly, sniffles a little, and Geno—he wants more information, wants more from Sidney than a drunken outburst that’s a few years too late. He thinks he’s owed more, and he can’t help still feeling angry about that, but right now Sidney is drunk, and devastated, and likely doesn’t have any more to give Geno.

“Come inside.” Geno is careful about reaching out to touch Sidney, to draw him in close, but he’s not really surprised when Sidney just leans into his arms and sags a little. Sidney has been leaning into him for all the time they’ve been teammates, clamping on to every hold, seeming to wait for every touch. It makes Geno’s heart ache now in a way it never, ever has, and he is too tired to process it completely. “Sleep, feel better in morning.”

“No it won’t,” Sidney mumbles miserably. He goes as Geno moves him, though, gently guiding him through to the only free guestroom Sergei has on the first floor. Geno can’t help agreeing with the sentiment, wondering when it really is going to feel better, when “we’ll get ‘em next year” will start feeling less like a useless, baseless platitude and more like something that could be true.

“Sleep anyway,” Geno says. He waits until Sidney sighs heavily and strips enough to get comfortably in bed, and hovers at the door without really meaning to, watching Sidney toss and turn under the covers. When Sidney lets out a noise that sounds horrifyingly close to a sob, Geno bolts, heading upstairs with little regard for keeping quiet and slipping quickly back into bed.

He doesn’t drift off until the early hours of morning. Oksana is already awake and gone from bed, and from the sounds downstairs everyone else is, too. Geno wonders if they’ve discovered Sidney yet. He wonders what Oksana will think, and Mama and Papa, and he is grateful that Sergei will still be too wrapped up in the loss to concern himself too much with why Sidney Crosby is sacked out in his guestroom.

Sidney is nowhere in sight, though, by the time Geno is dressed and downstairs and surreptitiously poking his head into the guestroom. He makes his way into the kitchen, where breakfast is a spread out affair and everyone is treading lightly around Sergei, casting the same wary glances at Geno. Nobody says a word about Sidney, and Geno realizes he must’ve slipped out before anyone else woke up.

He’s immediately angry about that, and for a second finds himself wanting time to go faster so he can get through getaway day and grab Sidney to talk to him more. He regrets that, though, when it actually is time to clean out his locker and face the media. No one has it worse than Sidney, but Geno has to answer for his performance, and it’s one of the most difficult things he’s ever had to do.

Geno makes it a point to grab Sidney’s arm on the way out, ignoring Flower’s warning look and Sergei’s bewilderment. He walks him down an empty Mellon hallway, rolling his eyes as Sidney tries to wriggle away, and once he thinks they’re suitably distanced from anyone else, shoves Sidney at a wall and glares at him.

“Explain.”

“My parents—” Sidney starts, pointing beyond Geno, and Geno just slaps his hand down and glares harder.

“No. Parents wait. _Talk._ ”

Sidney deflates a little, staring down at his feet. He looks awful, sickly with playoff exhaustion and defeat and a hangover, and Geno would feel a lot more sympathy if this were two weeks ago. He doesn’t like seeing Sidney unhappy as a rule—Sidney’s unhappiness always rolls off him in waves, smothering Geno until all he wants to do is make whatever is wrong better, almost insensibly—but he’s too angry with him to feel it hurt the same way.

“I’m sorry,” Sidney says eventually, and Geno suppresses a groan, because that is not what he wants. “I shouldn’t have said those things, I didn’t mean them.”

“Need say more, Sid. I not understand, so much.”

“I—” Sidney starts. He swallows hard. “It’s a lot, though.”

“Time to tell. Think I should know, or else—I need. Please.”

“Okay,” Sidney says, crossing his arms over his chest and squeezing himself. He is still looking down at the floor, but in a second he looks up and he seems to have switched on the expression he’d just faced the media with—calm, poised, somehow neater.

It’s chilling, and Geno doesn’t like it. What he’s always liked most about Sidney is how deeply and apparently he feels things, good or bad, as if it’s not worth the effort to hide any of that from the team. He loves every one of his teammates with a fierce, clawing hold that Geno has never felt from anyone before, and loving Sidney back is simply a matter of course.

“It’s kind of a lot,” Sidney tells him. Geno sighs heavily and sits down on the floor of the hallway, looking up at Sidney pointedly until he sighs, too, and joins him. “Okay. So, on my seventh birthday—and there was this boathouse down the road from where we used to play street hockey—”

The more Sidney talks—he talks slowly and calmly and clearly, like he doesn’t want to leave Geno behind at any turn in the story—the more Geno feels his own shoulders slumping, and his brow knitting. He is trying to imagine meeting seven-year-old Sidney and talking to him, visiting him again and again and watching him grow up, and it’s so different from any other experiences he’s had with time travel that it seems unfathomable.

He has only ever revisited hockey more than once, recurring trips to rinks and arenas that he assumed had to do with hockey being his anchor in time. Geno has no idea what that makes Sidney, and from the way Sidney talks, he has no idea, either.

He has a lot of questions when Sidney is done, and the first is the most important. “Why you not tell?” Geno demands, and Sidney winces, shaking his head.

“At first, I mean—how could I tell you? I didn’t want it to go through Gonch or anyone. I’ve never told _anybody._ And then I just—I wasn’t sure how to bring it up.” Sidney has his hands clenched into fists on his knees, and he’s staring at them instead of looking at Geno. “I thought it would freak you out.”

Geno snorts. “I am time travel freak. You just normal hockey freak.” He considers an absurd, heart-pounding thought, and blurts it out before he can help it. “Sid. You not—you play hockey first, yes? Not because of me?”

Sidney is quiet long enough for Geno to start sweating, to clench his own hands into fists. “I played before I met you, yeah. I really loved it.” Geno is just breathing a sigh of relief when Sidney devastatingly adds, “But I didn’t really know I was going to be a hockey player until I met you.”

Geno’s skin prickles with chills for a second, and when he shivers, Sidney inches closer to him. It’s so minute that Geno’s not sure that Sidney even notices, and it instantly makes Geno feel warmer, though the warmth is complicated and a little unsettling.

He doesn’t know what to say to Sidney. He wants to apologize again, but he’s unsure of why. He’s never, ever made as much of an impact on the past as he apparently has—will—with Sidney. Geno has always been an observer, and it’s unsettling to think that he’s had any kind of formative influence on Sidney. He’s been the one following Sidney for so long, watching him and modeling himself after him. It makes his head ache to think that it could be the other way around, too.

His head aches even more when he thinks of Sidney kissing him, and what that could mean, but—he can’t think like that. Sidney was drunk, and has not mentioned it, and Geno thinks this is complicated enough without factoring anything like that in. He swallows hard and gathers words for his next question.

“I tell you things about future?”

“No,” Sidney says, and he laughs a little, just a bit bitter. “I mean, a few things. You told me we would play together, at least until you’re 26. You told me I was—that I’m good, I guess.” Sidney flushes, and Geno mentally corrects him; he must’ve told—will tell, and Geno has never had to deal with any confusion like this, it’s been one of the perks of not visiting the future—Sidney that he’s the best hockey player in the world. Sidney said that, and accused Geno of lying, and—

“Not lie,” Geno says firmly, bumping Sidney’s shoulder. “You are best. I say now, I say again.”

Sidney goes quiet, drawing in on himself, and Geno wants to shake him. He holds himself to just bumping Sidney again. “We lost, Geno.”

“Yes, I remember,” Geno says. He rolls his eyes. “Was there too, happen yesterday.”

“Ha ha. But, if I were really the best, we would’ve—”

“One person can’t win Cup,” Geno says, realizing that he’s repeating words that Denis had left in a voicemail for him as the final buzzer sounded, a message that Geno still hasn’t been able to get through completely. He hasn’t talked to Denis yet either, and he is dreading it at the same time he is looking forward to it. “If one person win, maybe I win always. I win for Penguins, I try but—can’t. You can’t too.”

He hadn’t fully believed that until now, but saying it to Sidney makes the sentiment feel more believable, like if it’s true for Sidney—and it has to be, because Geno knows what Sidney is, knows how amazing he is, and if one person truly could win the Stanley Cup, Geno is fairly sure that it would be Sidney—it might be true for him, too.

“I have to be better,” Sidney insists. “It’s just—we have to reset everything now, start from zero again. We’re gonna—we’ll lose Bugsy, I think, and I can’t even—how are we going to do it without—”

He’s getting worked up, and Geno remembers when Army got traded, remembers Max calling him and telling him, “We’re doing movies at Sid’s, pick up as much candy as you can and get over here and make him smile,” and he’d gathered with a handful of teammates to hear Sidney tell everyone how okay he was, really, this was a good thing and good for the team. He’d been decent to okay at making Sidney smile, coming in second to Flower but way better than Max. He thinks he knows how to handle this one, too.

“Shh,” Geno says first, and then, “Bugsy maybe stay, maybe not. Maybe good to start new next year. And you just say—we always play together. You know future, Sid. I never leave, so you have me.” He takes a deep breath. “I not Bugsy, but—promise try hard. And I promise we win together.” He doesn’t need to know the future to know that they’ll win a Cup together; he’s very sure that it’s only a matter of time, no matter what happened yesterday.

Sidney is very, very still beside him, and when he finally speaks, his voice is painfully earnest, so serious. “You’re the only thing I’ve ever been sure of,” Sidney says. “All I ever knew about my future was that it would be—it would be you and hockey.”

Geno feels his breath catch. He’s never known anything about his future, and he’s almost jealous of Sidney; if he had known that his future would always include Sidney and hockey, he thinks he’d have grown up a lot less scared.

And now, knowing that he has at least four more years with the Penguins, and with Sidney—it’s hard not to think about the kiss, and impossible not to be breathlessly excited.

 

Geno doesn’t see much more of Sidney before he leaves for the summer. There are other things to take care of, and in the back of Geno’s mind, he is smugly content to think that he and Sidney have a lot of time.

He makes sure that their time is solidly set. Compared to contracts he has or hasn’t negotiated in the past, Geno’s new deal with the Penguins becomes as simple as writing Sidney’s salary down on a piece of paper and passing it to Shero. Barry laughs nervously, gives him a dangerous look, but Geno shrugs and considers the matter done, happy to have it out of the way.

When the news spreads throughout the team, a few guys gather at Sergei’s to clink beers together and toast Geno’s deal. Papa and Max always get along wildly through pantomime, and Bugsy shows up with his shoulders hunched, his mouth set a little, but happy for Geno.

“It’s just business,” he says when they all work around the awkwardness enough to ask him what’s going on. Max snorts, muttering something no doubt unpleasant in French. Geno doesn’t quite like it either, enough that he’s glad that Sidney hadn’t come, because Sidney would like it even less.

Hossa is just business, too, and Geno’s stomach twists when he walks. The Detroit signing is bad enough, leaving a bitter taste in his mouth that he doesn’t like, because Hossa was good in the room and a good guy. He was good to Sidney the way everyone is when they play with him, like they can’t help it, but Geno knows that the best thing to do for Sidney is to stay with him; he knew that before he found out about traveling to visit Sidney in the past. And he still can’t mentally separate Hossa and Colby, so it necessitates a quick text to Sidney, a day or two before he’s going to leave.

Sidney has been busy, but he drives to Sergei’s early one morning, a ball cap jammed on his head and his mouth still in a perpetual frown. “Hey,” he says when Geno lets him in, and he looks around shiftily, holding something wrapped in gold paper in one hand. Geno rolls his eyes.

“New house next year,” Geno tells Sidney, getting him lemonade and gesturing out towards the deck. “Sergei say I am big boy now, big boy contract.”

“Congratulations, Geno,” Sidney says, smiling a little and taking his glass. He hasn’t moved where Geno pointed to, so Geno pushes him along with a hand on the small of his back, and Sidney goes then, but keeps chattering. “It’s not really a surprise, but—”

“Big shot, know future,” Geno says, and Sidney laughs, the sound a little cracked. “Next year, I meet little Sid. Then I know all secrets.”

“Yeah,” Sidney says, leaning back in the deck chair Geno shoves him at and looking thoughtful. “Next year. Here.”

He shoves the present at Geno, gulps at his lemonade, and stares rather stubbornly out at Sergei’s pool. Geno shakes the package a little, pretending to listen to it, but Sidney doesn’t manage to crack a smile this time, only glancing over at Geno in shifty increments. Geno sighs and starts opening it.

He blinks at Eddie Shore’s book, frowning down at it. Sidney sits up straighter, staring at the book too, and Geno moves his fingers over the worn, English-language cover and the cracked spine. It looks well-used. “Sid. I thank? But already have, you know Mario—”

“I know,” Sidney says quickly. “Mario got you a Russian copy, I know you—I know that. But this one’s my copy. My dad got it for me when I was 14 because I wanted to know more about time travel.” He nods a little, and Geno opens the book carefully, sucking in a breath when he sees how much is highlighted and underlined, dozens of handwritten notes in every margin.

Stuck in the back are pieces of paper that look ripped out from a notebook, and Sidney’s loopy, scribbly handwriting is evident. On some sheets, the handwriting looks younger, like that of a child, and there is one sheet full of numbers written in handwriting that looks like Geno’s own.

“Can’t take this,” Geno says, swallowing hard and shutting the book quickly, his heart pounding. He tries to push it towards Sidney and Sidney just bats it back, shaking his head. “No, Sid. You have for years, I can’t—”

“I want you to have it,” Sidney tells him, shrugging. “I have it practically memorized, and I kept, uh, some of the stuff I used to write to you. I don’t need it anymore.”

“Why?” Geno asks. “Why you give?”

“There are dates in there,” Sidney says carefully. “They’re dates from the past, and a few I had to guess at for the future, because you were never really specific about when things happened. But I—I want you to know the future, too, at least a little bit. It’s not fair that I know things that you don’t.”

“Know my future,” Geno says. “Know my future is with Pens. What else I need?”

Sidney squints at him, for so long that Geno thinks about asking him if he’d like to borrow sunglasses. Then, with his voice a little gravelly, he says, “Can I—” and then climbs onto Geno’s deck chair, hugging him tightly.

Geno hugs him back without hesitation.

“Please read it,” Sidney says. He sounds a bit desperate, speaking into Geno’s shoulder. “Even if you know how it ends, just—read it, okay?”

“Okay,” Geno says, though he has never even finished the copy Mario gave him, and the idea of opening this one again makes him overwhelmed.

He pats Sidney on the back a few times and then Sidney lets him go, studying his face for a second before giving him a small smile. Geno smiles back, a bit helpless, and pats the book, too. “Good gift, best. Talbot just give me dead arm.”

“Talbot’s a joke,” Sidney says, moving back to his own deck chair and picking up his lemonade again. He crosses his legs at the ankles and settles a little, the frown finally completely chased. Geno keeps smiling at him.

He doesn’t manage to read the whole book, though, not that summer. He’s glad he didn’t promise Sidney he would, and when he defends himself mentally, it’s because he doesn’t have a lot of time, or that much English.

The offseason is short, shorter still because he has to move in to his new house in Pittsburgh. Sergei and Ksenia basically hold his hand through the whole thing, and Jordy shows up to help, as if he has any more expertise on the subject of moving or living in a house on his own than Geno does. It’s still a lot of work, exhausting, and when it’s all done, he is very aware of his parents and Oksana still back home, and Sergei and Ksenia down the street, and Geno’s house feels very, very big.

It only feels that big the first night, though. As Pittsburgh fills up with more teammates, Geno’s house fills and empties of them in bunches. When his parents do arrive, they seem happy to find Jordy going through Geno’s movie collection and complaining about it, Whits asking questions about his pool that Geno doesn’t know how to answer.

Somehow, Max and Papa are the ones to team up and throw together a housewarming party. Geno fears that this means there will be an overabundance of strippers and cigars, but in the end it’s really nice. The new house looks really good full, Geno thinks.

Sidney doesn’t come, which stings more than it should considering the majority of the team _is_ there, including Therrien. “Sid is a busy guy,” Therrien says when Geno tells him Sidney’s not coming, nodding sagely like he approves. “He will make it up to you, though. You know him.”

Geno does know Sidney, knows how loyal he is and how good about these things he usually is, but apparently he doesn’t know him well enough to anticipate what happens the next morning. He is woken up from a bleary near-hangover by the doorbell ringing around 10 am, and though he grumbles over at Max sacked out on the couch adjacent to the armchair Geno had landed in, Max ignores him. Mama and Papa and Oksana also all ignore the doorbell in their respective corners of the house, likely on purpose, and Geno sighs heavily and drags himself up, the fleece throw blanket with printed penguins all over it that had been a housewarming gift from Dupuis wrapped around his shoulders.

Geno blinks in the morning sunlight when he opens the door to a strange man in a delivery uniform, holding a clipboard. “I have these chairs for Evgeni Malkin,” the delivery guy says, cracking gum and pronouncing Evgeni like his nickname should be Jenny. Geno nods a little dumbly, signs the form the delivery guy sticks under his nose, and steps back to let him in.

It’s not until two large leather armchairs have been wheeled into Geno’s front hallway when he thinks to note, “Not order any chairs.”

“Someone ordered them,” the delivery guy says, and he looks down at the form again, frowning. “Crosby? They’re from Crosby. Oh, hey, that explains a lot.”

“What?” Geno says, but the guy just waves him over and then pulls some of the opaque plastic covering away from the top of one of the chairs. He shows him the Pittsburgh Penguins logo printed on the leather.

“Kind of cool, right?” the deliver guy says, a glint in his eye that tells Geno he should get ready to sign more stuff. He has the guy wheel the chairs further into the house first, though, still feeling a little dumbfounded but growing steadily more amused. Of course Sidney would get him Pittsburgh Penguin chairs. Of course he would.

Max is blinking like a mole on the couch when Geno and the chairs make it in. He wakes up enough to sign an autograph for the delivery guy, too, then waves after him, staring at the chairs with a growing, evil grin. “Oh my God.”

“House warm present,” Geno says, fishing around in the cushions of the chair he’d slept in for his phone to text Sidney.

“They’re so _ugly_ ,” Max tells him, utterly delighted.

“Go good in media room,” Geno decides, thinking of the giant space he’s still setting up. They are ugly, in the appropriate colors of black, white and Vegas gold, and they’re absolutely wonderful. “From Sid.”

Max basically falls down laughing, holding his stomach and howling until Mama comes in, fully dressed and perfectly put together, of course, and scowling a bit at him. She turns her scowl on the chairs, and with wide eyes, she slowly says, “Oh my. Zhenya?”

“They’re a present from Sidney,” Geno tells her, finally emerging triumphant with his phone and quickly tapping out _Thank for chair. Best!!!!_ “I think they’ll work in the media room, yes? Theater seating.”

“Zhenya,” Mama says flatly, disapproval dripping heavily from the word. Max cracks up again and Geno smiles brightly at them both, any hint of a hangover gone. His phone vibrates with an answer from Sidney: _You’re welcome. Happy housewarming!_

 _Best_ Geno texts again, and he hopes Sidney knows he doesn’t just mean the chairs.

Only Papa genuinely likes the chairs out of everyone that winds up seeing them; he thinks they’re charming. Oksana’s lip curls as soon as she sees them and Sergei laughs as hard as Max, but he helps Geno arrange them in the media room and looks around the space thoughtfully.

“You need more chairs,” Sergei says, and he shakes his head. “Chairs that aren’t ugly.”

“These are perfect,” Geno says, feeling flushed with delight, not having moved from one of them since he set them down in front of the projector screen. He looks over at the other one and imagines Sidney sitting in it, reclined all the way back with his feet up, and suddenly can’t wait for Sidney to come over. He looks at the emptiness of the rest of the room, though, and concedes the point. “Fine, more of them would be good. I’ll ask Sid where he got these.”

“For God’s sake,” Sergei mutters, throwing up his hands and heading out. “You’re both insane.”

Oksana agrees, unsurprisingly, insisting on taking him chair shopping. When he doesn’t see anything he really likes, he winds up picking plain black leather recliners just to appease her, and it turns into a fight anyway, which has been happening a lot.

And when Oksana heads home not too long into the beginning of the season, the new chairs haven’t even shipped yet, and Geno takes the opportunity to call up the manufacturer and see if he can have them customized. He winds up with a whole arsenal of Pittsburgh Penguin chairs, not entirely uniform but entirely _his_ , and he feels an absurd amount of pride every time he looks at them.

“Sid best,” Geno says at practice, to Flower but where Sidney can overhear, so there can be no confusion. He watches with satisfaction as Sidney’s ears turn pink.

 

Geno doesn’t travel that much during the run-up to their return to the Stanley Cup Finals. It happens rarely enough that he feels ridiculous hope of being cured, tries to look at Oksana differently than he used to, even though he doesn’t really feel any differently about her than he usually does.

“We’re not soulmates,” Oksana tells him matter-of-factly over dinner one night. Geno is on his second steak and much more interested in that than in this conversation, but he nods gamely and lets her continue. “We would feel it if we were.”

“How do you know?” Geno asks, mostly to be contrary, but also curious. He’s never felt the way he feels about hockey about any one person, so he knows she’s probably right, but everyone he’s ever talked to always says that soulmates feels like something specific. And they always have a different specific something.

“I just _know_ ,” Oksana says, huffing a little indignantly and sipping at her wine. This is the first time they’ve had dinner together for a while; playoffs time is largely team time, constantly team time, and Geno is pretty much fine with that. “I can’t explain it because I’ve never felt it before.”

“But how do you _know_ you’ve never felt it before if you don’t know what it feels like?” Geno says insistently. He thinks the only thing that keeps her from walking out on him is the prospect of going back to Geno’s and getting picked on by Mama.

Oksana’s lips press together, and it takes her a long time before she says, “If we were soulmates, this conversation would be funnier. But you are not nearly as funny as you think you are.”

“What, I’m hilarious,” Geno says, and he spends the rest of the dinner telling the dirtiest jokes he knows, watching her mouth twitch as she tries to stay mad.

She’s not entirely successful, because she holds his hand on the way back to his car and on the drive home. “Do you wish we were soulmates?” she asks when she’s unzipping her dress in the bedroom, letting the straps slide all the way down her shoulders until the whole thing pools at her feet.

Geno thinks about it, lying back on the bed and starting to play with his dick. He’s hard when he hisses out, “Yes,” and Oksana climbs on top of him, staring down with her hair all around her face.

“Why?” she asks, pressing the way she’s best at. Her hand joins his and she jerks him lightly, a cool, stiff tease. Geno swallows hard and thinks about the part of the Eddie Shore book he has never let himself get to, because he already knows how it ends.

“Because if we were soulmates, I could stay with you always,” Geno says, and he hopes that sounds romantic instead of how selfishly he really means it.

Oksana isn’t fooled. She never, ever is. She tightens her hold on his dick and peers at him carefully, sharply. “That’s not what you want,” she says shrewdly.

Geno thinks to argue, because in a way it is. He hates time travel, hates always leaving everybody. With Sidney comes the certainty that there is one person he won’t leave for the foreseeable future, but even that has an expiration date, a drop-off into the unknown. And Geno loves Oksana, and would stay with her forever if it meant he could _stay_.

But he loses the words to argue that as Oksana raises herself up and sinks down on his cock, rumbling out a deep groan and closing her eyes. And even when Geno is fucking Oksana, watching her and loving her, he can’t pretend that he wants to stay because he loves her, because she’s Oksana.

No matter what Eddie Shore says, Geno thinks the soulmate thing is bullshit, anyway. Not just because he knows he isn’t cured—he has a list of dates that are proof of that, proof that this is a lapse, a rest, not a complete end—but because nobody fucking knows what a soulmate is. He believes that hockey is his anchor, but he can’t believe that there’s any one person on Earth important enough to him to keep him in the present. He can’t believe that if such a person exists, it’s not his brother or his parents, people he loves with his whole heart and nothing less.

He believes in hockey, though, and hockey keeping him in the present. It’s the only thing he’s ever proven.

“I have a theory,” Sidney tells him at their very short morning skate, after Coach Dan has nervously taken Geno aside and asked him if he’s had any “incidents”. Geno is stupidly, ridiculously glad to be rid of Therrien, feels 30 pounds lighter without the weight of his disapproving stare on his back all the time, but he does miss his unflinching, matter-of-fact approach to Geno’s time travel. Dan often talks to him about it like he’s terrified for Geno, wants to wrap him in a blanket and give him something hot to drink just for thinking about it.

“It’s in the book,” Sidney adds pointedly, and Geno groans and leans over as if to take a faceoff with his hands on thighs, busted.

“Sorry, Sid. I read some, but is a lot, and you—handwriting is terrible.”

Sidney slashes him with his stick, quick and dirty and stinging his wrists lightly, just over his glove. “It is not. And whatever, you were always stubborn about this when I was younger, too. I’m not surprised.”

“Not mad, just disappointed,” Geno says, parroting the best of Sidney’s attempts to rally the Penguins just before the Therrien debacle, in the very dark midseason days. What Sidney never realized was that the room was always behind him, the team would follow wherever he lead without question, and when he finally lead them away from Therrien, it was like the sun breaking out through thick gray clouds.

“I’m not mad or disappointed, oh my God,” Sidney says, shaking his head. Geno bites his bottom lip, smiling at him with his head ducked. “The theory, though—”

“Yes. Tell theory.”

“The better you’re doing at hockey, the less you travel,” Sidney says. His voice has gone flat and methodical, and Geno turns the words over in his mind, thinking about them.

“Okay,” he says eventually. “Maybe.”

“There’s precedent,” Sidney tells him, using his careful know-it-all voice again. Geno’s not sure, but then again, he’s never looked for patterns in traveling, nothing besides knowing that he wouldn’t travel during a hockey game, because that was what was important. Sidney looks for patterns in everything, though. “And, okay, this is still confusing, but there will be precedent. You visited me once and you said you were having a really, really good year, and that you hadn’t traveled in months.”

Geno’s stomach swoops at that. He’s never, ever gone months without traveling, and it sounds like heaven. “Good theory, Sid,” he says, and he watches Sidney smile carefully, small and pleased. “Hope you right. Means I have to play very good hockey.”

“Uh, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’re doing that anyway,” Sidney says, and he laughs incredulously, a little breathlessly. His eyes are shining and admiring, and Geno feels warm from head to toe to think he could make Sidney look like that.

“Can do better,” Geno promises solemnly, and Sidney looks so excited.

That night, he nets a hat trick against Carolina. He feels delirious with happiness and pride, the whited-out crowd swallowing him up in swelling chants of “GE-NO!” He can’t see Mama and Papa in the crowd but he can feel them, and after his third goal, Geno looks at the bench and zeroes in on Sidney’s beaming face, his sweaty, curly hair and his awful, scraggly beard, and he feels stupid for thinking that anything else could keep him in the present but hockey, that anything else could anchor him more than this. This is what he was made for, what he’s meant for. This is where he belongs.

Then they win the Cup.

“You promised!” Sidney yells at him, nearly incoherent with joy, half-sobbing and half-laughing. Geno crushes Sidney into a hug, feeling like he can promise him dozens more Cups, he’ll promise him anything, but he doesn’t have the time to get the words out: there is so much more to do, so many more people to hug, teammates to pile on and cling to, his parents and Oksana to hold. He sobs into Denis’ shoulder, kisses the side of Sergei’s head, drinks from the Cup with _Mario Lemieux_ and thanks him in two languages over and over again.

The locker room becomes a blur after a while, champagne everywhere, Max screaming in his face periodically and Feds shaking him by the shoulders and everyone a happy, messy wreck. There is a moment when Geno has to sit down, close his eyes and take a breath, and he can’t wait to open them again.

Then he does, and he is not in the locker room anymore.

He’s still in Detroit, he knows that immediately; the Joe is an overwhelming crush of red around him. The crowd’s cheers are roaring and bloodthirsty and when Geno looks at the scoreboard, he knows why. Datsyuk is still celebrating a wicked wrister from just at the top of the circle, in past Flower and still apparent in the dejected slump of his shoulders. The Wings are winning four to two and Geno smiles, because he remembers this game.

Therrien is still behind the bench; it is November and things haven’t gotten truly awful yet, but this is the Penguins team that will win the Cup. This is the team that battles back at every turn, the team that Therrien lost and that Dan Bylsma resurrected, cutting into the Wings’ lead ruthlessly.

Geno remembers scoring the Penguins’ third goal, remembers the clink of the pipe as the puck rings off it and into the net, knows exactly when it’s going to happen before it does. He watches with bated breath anyway, ignored and enthralled, shivering with cold and anticipation. He watches _Jordy_ , who drags the team into a six-six overtime with a hat trick, and he yells louder than he should in the past when it’s Jordy again who strips Pasha of the puck in OT and sets it up to finish the Wings off.

He is breathless, dizzy with thrill and love for his team, love for _hockey_ , and he closes his eyes. When he opens them again, he is still shivering but back in the locker room, back in June 12th, 2009.

For a split second, Geno makes the instinctive mistake of thinking that the locker room is empty. It’s been hours and surely everyone has gone back to the hotel or perhaps back to Pittsburgh, in the case of the team. It’ll be no trouble to fly back with his family instead, and they know he will rejoin them soon enough.

He catches himself, though, and looks around more closely, and there—Sidney is sitting in Geno’s locker stall, head slumped to the side in a way that is doubtlessly painful for his neck. He’s asleep, cradling a bottle of champagne, and Geno’s heart aches looking at him, thudding heavily in his chest.

Geno goes to him quickly, snagging the first pair of shorts he sees and tugging them on before carefully shaking Sidney awake. “Sid,” he says, gently but firmly, and Sidney blinks at him, frowning until he has to yawn so wide his jaw cracks a little.

“Hey Geno,” Sidney says, stretching a bit. Geno leans into Sidney’s outstretched arms and hugs him, pushing the champagne bottle away and trying to squeeze into the stall with him. He can’t, the space is too tight, so he kneels next to it instead, but Sidney just giggles and hugs him back, pressing his head into Geno’s bare shoulder and squeezing him very tightly. He smells like champagne and cigar smoke and sweat, his hair dried in raggedy curls, and Geno breathes him in greedily. “Where’d you go?”

“Wings game in November,” Geno says promptly, and when Sidney leans back to look at him, his eyes are lit up, delighted. “Jordy hat trick.”

“Oh my God,” Sidney says, laughing a little. “Geno. That game. And—Geno, we won the _Cup._ ”

“I _know_ ,” Geno says, and he laughs, too.

“Thank you,” Sidney tells him when he’s done laughing, and Geno rolls his eyes. “No, not for the Cup, but—yeah, thank you for that, thank you _so much_ —”

“Shut up, Sidney. You win us Cup, too.”

“Thank you for not telling me,” Sidney says, and Geno stares at him, baffled for a second. “I mean, when I was a kid. You always said you wouldn’t cheat, you wouldn’t tell me the future, and I didn’t know—I didn’t know it would happen until it did. So thank you. This was the best night of my life.”

“Thank wrong person,” Geno says, and Sidney’s already shaking his head, eyes a little glassy. “Not me yet. I not meet little Sid yet.”

“It’s still you,” Sidney insists. “You’re the same person, you’re—thank you in advance, if you want to think of it that way. Just _thank you._ ”

“Welcome,” Geno says, feeling a little wrong, almost guilty. He’s not the Geno that Sidney met all those years ago, not yet, and he knows how much Sidney loves that Geno. Sometimes it doesn’t feel right that Sidney looks at him like that, like Geno’s his hero, when Geno isn’t that person yet. But it feels good to think he’s Sidney’s hero just for this, for what he’s done in the last three years, for what they’ve built together in Pittsburgh. He likes that thought a lot. “I not know future, either. Sometimes I want, but now I’m glad too.”

“It’s great, right?” Sidney says, wondrous. “We didn’t know it was going to happen, we just—we just did it.” He looks at Geno again, like he hung the fucking moon, and Geno’s heart pounds. His hands are a little sweaty. “You promised we would, though. You didn’t know and you promised, and you did it.”

“We did it,” Geno says firmly. And then he’s caught by Sidney’s face, bright and still so young, his lips wet and his eyes still a little puffy. He doesn’t know what Sidney was like as a child, not yet, and he doesn’t know what he and young Sidney have gone through together, but this Sidney—he loves Sidney right now, maybe more than he ever has in any other moment, and it makes him feel crazy.

He leans in before he can think of anything, of the past or the present or the future, of soulmates or even hockey—there is nothing in his head but how tightly they’re still holding on to each other. And then there is how Sidney’s lips feel on his, wet and cracked and frozen in shock, when Geno leans all the way in to kiss him.

Geno’s head is spinning too much to think of how long this kiss lasts or even to compare it to the other one. Sidney unfreezes fast and kisses back like he’d just been waiting for this, and it’s that thought—the thought of Sidney waiting for so, so long—that has Geno suddenly waking up and pulling back, staring at Sidney with a rush of guilt that’s surely playing over his face.

Sidney stares back at him for a minute, his eyes wide and dark. He swallows hard, and buries his face back in Geno’s shoulder, and Geno can feel him swallowing hard. “Thank you,” he says again, his voice hoarse. Geno feels like he’s been punched in the heart.

“Shouldn’t do that,” Geno says quietly, and Sidney nods quickly. Geno can feel his heart beating very fast, and he is so warm against him, but Sidney is always warm. “Have girlfriend, Sid. Sorry. Stupid.”

“I know,” Sidney mumbles, and then he pulls back to look at Geno again, his eyes still very wide, and now hopeful. “Do you think—maybe someday, maybe she’s—could she be your anchor?”

He even _sounds_ hopeful, and Geno feels like dirt, nothing like the hero he wants to be, or the one Sidney so incorrectly thinks he is. He feels even worse when he lies and says, “Yes. Maybe in future.”

“Good,” Sidney says. He nods firmly, and his voice is very businesslike when he says, “So the team is actually waiting for us at the hotel, we should—”

“Yes,” Geno says fervently, and he stands up. He helps Sidney stand out of instinct, and Sidney holds on to him for just a breath longer than anyone else would. Geno feels like the worst person in the world, and he tries to shake that feeling as he grabs up more clothes, walks out with Sidney shoulder to shoulder.

He doesn’t quite manage it, but just before they get to the hotel, Sidney looks at Geno and reminds him, “We _won_ the _Cup_ ,” and it’s hard to feel like anything but great after that.

 

 

Geno is the last player to have his day with the Cup; he is going to pass it on to Mario next.

The day is ridiculous, hectic and overwhelming, joyously wonderful. Letting Magnitogorsk become a part of his Cup win is so incredibly important to him. Including old teammates, friends and everyone who makes this city home to him in the celebrations brings a certain kind of peace to what’s been a pretty turbulent situation. Geno feels like he’s forgiven, and like he can forgive in turn.

It’s almost hard to imagine the scared young boy who felt trapped here, staring in at his dream from the outside and wanting. Geno can’t picture himself wanting anything more than what he has right now: Mama and Papa and Denis surrounding him, Oksana on his arm, small children coming up to gasp at the Cup and smile at him.

He feels so far removed from that boy that facing men like Velichkin or Rachnikov is easy. Geno can stand tall and proud and thank them for all their help when he was younger, for helping shape him into the man he is now, and he can even mean it.

When the day is over, Geno says goodbye to the Cup, watches it leave with the Keeper and decides that it will be his once again someday. Winning is addictive, and this kind of fierce pride is too much to let go completely, to not want to build upon.

He texts Sidney against his better judgment, that night before he goes to bed. Oksana is already asleep, exhausted as much as he is, and Geno taps out a careful, forlorn message to Sidney swallowing down every bit of guilt.

_Say bye to Cup (((_

Sidney answers him almost immediately, which makes Geno worry his lower lip with his teeth and sigh a little. _Don’t worry, you’ll have it again._

 _Yes_ Geno taps out quickly, smiling despite himself. _Agree. I say that too._

 _Great minds think alike,_ Sidney sends, and Geno sends back _Best_ without a second thought. English doesn’t have the greatest words for Sidney, and not many are to Geno’s liking, but best usually works well. It’s possible he’s thought about that too much; it’s possible that’s part of why he feels so guilty texting his teammate at night, in bed next to his girlfriend.

He has tried very hard not to think about the kiss, either one of them really. It’s taken coaching, practice, a week or two on a break with Oksana and fucking other women and reminding himself how much he likes that. He’s never kissed a man before and never really thought about kissing any (and boyish, feverish thoughts about hockey legends absolutely do not count, everyone knows that) and doing any more of it is just not something Geno sees as acceptable for himself. It’s pretty easy to make those thoughts go away on a different side of the ocean than Sidney, though, and Geno won’t examine that difference too closely.

It only gets difficult when Sidney does shit like text him _Goodnight, Geno_ because he knows the time difference and remembers it and that’s—sometimes Geno doesn’t always keep the time difference straight. Sometimes he texts Sidney first thing in the morning and wakes him up, but Sidney has never done that to him in return.

His technique is to simply put his phone away and try to go to sleep. He thinks about the Cup as he closes his eyes, and though he concentrates hard on how it felt in his hands, how it glinted in the hard Magnitogorsk sun, how it made his parents shine with pride, Geno’s thoughts slide inevitably to Sidney standing under it, too.

Geno squeezes his eyes harder shut, as if that will help, and then flips them open when he feels suddenly cold.

He looks around to note his surroundings, squinting in low light and wrinkling his nose at the smell of salt and sea and rotting, molding wood. He slowly makes out what looks like a large rack containing some boating equipment, and beyond that a few lawn chairs facing each other in the center of the small space.

He thinks it might be some kind of boathouse, and no sooner does the thought enter his mind than his stomach sinks with realization.

And then the door to the boathouse opens. Geno is fast to duck behind the rack, swearing silently as he jostles it and makes noise, but the small boy—and he is _small_ , tinier than any pictures of young Sidney had ever suggested—is already alert and focused, gripping a small hockey stick tightly in front of him and narrowing his eyes around the boathouse.

Geno knows what’s going to happen. Sidney told him. This is the first part of his future he has a plan for, but he’s still scared shitless when Sidney locks eyes with him, as scared as Sidney looks. It’s so strange to think of this boy as Sidney, to connect him to the fearless man that Geno can’t quite stop thinking about, and he has a feeling that that’s only going to get more difficult after this.

But this is the future. He can’t stop the future. Geno braces himself, his shoulders stiffening, his spine straightening. He says, “Hello,” and everything starts there.


	3. Part Three

 

 

  
**Part Three**   
_2010-2013  
_

_And will you succeed?_   
_Yes! You will, indeed!_   
_(98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.)_

The lake is as frozen as it ever really gets. Geno peeks out at it through the frosty window of the boathouse, wondering if it would be wise for Sidney to ever really skate on it. The spidery cracks make his stomach swoop, even though he knows better. Knowing the future isn’t always as reassuring as he had once imagined it would be.

The boathouse is freezing, and Geno pulls Troy Crosby’s too-large clothes tighter around him. There is a thick wool blanket on one of the lawn chairs that he knows has been left for him, but he waits to pick it up until Sidney arrives. Sidney has never kept him waiting long.

It’s only a few more moments before Geno is drawn from the window by a burst of cold, wet air signaling Sidney’s arrival. Sidney is bundled up, only the tip of his nose and his bright, smiling eyes visible through layers of scarf and a hat pulled down low, but when he unwinds the scarf, his cheeks are bright pink.

Geno smiles brightly at him and tries doing his usual quick age calculations. He has the same list of dates that Sidney has, and so far they’ve gone in order for him: four visits since Sidney turned seven, and this will be his fifth. That would make Sidney nine, but he still looks so small. Geno is only vaguely aware of what nine-year-olds are supposed to look like, and he always thinks Sidney looks smaller than he should.

“Hi Sid,” Geno says, sitting down in one of the lawn chairs and picking up the blanket. It looks homemade, which makes Geno’s heart twinge a bit. It does that entirely too much for both versions of Sidney, in ways that Geno must keep separate for his own sanity.

“Hi Geno,” Sidney says back, his voice bright and chipper. “Are we still playing hockey together?”

“Yes. Good hockey.” He tries to think of what he can tell Sidney about their hockey without cheating; he will never get the thought of Sidney thanking him for keeping the Cup win a secret out of his head for good, just as he can’t seem to get the thought of the kiss that followed out of there, either. “On break now, for Olympics.”

He cringes immediately, though, because that opens up the torrent of questions he’s come to expect from Sidney. “ _Really_? The Olympics? Are you playing for Russia?” Sidney already looks like he wants to bounce out of his seat, tugging off his small gloves even though his hands are shaking when they’re bare. Geno wants to cup his hands around Sidney’s tiny ones, and shakes that desire off, thinking about how he’s going to answer him.

“Not gonna tell,” he settles on eventually, which of course makes Sidney outraged. His squeaky indignation is so reminiscent of the Sidney that Geno knows that he has to bite his tongue on either a laugh or a sob or both. “Told you is cheating.”

“But _how_?” Sidney groans, slumping dramatically back in his seat and sighing out heavily.

“Take all fun out. Maybe you know, and in future you say ‘hey Geno, you make Team Russia, you best’ and then no fun surprise for me.” Making the Russian national team hadn’t exactly been a surprise for Geno, but it’s a point that he knows will become important to Sidney in the future, so he sticks with it stalwartly.

Sidney wrinkles his nose, thinking. That is familiar too, and Geno shivers a little. In his head, this Sidney and the Sidney of the future are two completely separate people, and they have to remain that way for him to keep his sanity. The affection he feels for both of them is different and distinct and the ways in which they intersect are way too weird for him.

“But that would be mean,” Sidney says eventually, looking at Geno with wide, earnest eyes. “I wouldn’t ruin the surprise, Geno. I would never do that. You can tell me.”

And Geno has to fight not to hug himself, to bend over with the force of Sidney’s simple, young goodness. It’s yet another part of him that has persisted, somehow, and it makes Geno feel overwhelmed.

“I know, Sid,” Geno says when he thinks he can talk without his voice breaking. “Know you wouldn’t, just joke. But—still. Not cheat.”

“But what about me?” Sidney asks, quickly changing tracks in a move that Geno knows is tactical. “Am I on Team Canada? Probably not, there are so many—where are the Olympics? You’re not gonna tell me, ugh, but what about—” He goes suddenly quiet, brow furrowing slightly, and then frowns over at Geno. “Are we enemies, because of our countries?”

“ _No_ ,” Geno says fervently, because there are some things that Sidney should grow up knowing, and this is one of them. “No, not enemies, never. No matter—even if we different teams, different countries, we always friends. Always.”

“Always,” Sidney echoes, and his smile is splitting his round, chubby face in half. Geno smiles back and holds out his fist for Sidney to bump with his, watching the careful but clumsy movements with amusement and warmth flooding him.

When he gets back, Ilya is thumbing through a magazine on the sofa of their shared suite. Geno’s clothes are folded in a pile on the armchair he’d been lounging in that morning when he’d traveled, and there is a Styrofoam container on the coffee table in front of Ilya, which he points at without looking at Geno.

“You missed lunch, I got you some sushi.”

“Thank you,” Geno says, rubbing his hands together for warmth and picking up his clothes. Ilya shrugs, his practiced, clearly coached nonchalance palpable and a little unsettling in the room. Sasha and Sergei must have gotten to him quickly when the room assignments were shared and both had decided to remain in the Village.

Geno appreciates it, in a way, though a part of him feels uncomfortable, as if he is horribly scarred and Ilya is making sure to look at any other thing in the room but him. He picks up the container and heads for the kitchen to eat, picking up a salmon roll between two fingers, and he has his mouth full when he hears Ilya call, “Meet anyone interesting in your travels, Zhenya?”

Geno chews thoughtfully, thinking of Sidney’s young, bright face. He glances at the big kitchen clock and thinks some more, eventually answering, “Yes,” and putting down his sushi. “Canada has the practice ice today, yeah?”

“Yes,” Ilya says slowly, and when Geno heads past him to grab warmer clothes and grab for his shoes, he squints at him with the same judgmental flatness he had used to make him settle his ridiculous, overblown spat with Sasha. “Are you going to heckle them? Were you possessed by Sasha while you were in space? I’m not sure how this works.”

“I wasn’t in space,” Geno says, rolling his eyes and pulling his socks on. “I was in the 90s. I was not possessed. I’d like to go see how Canada’s doing.”

“They won’t let you in to spy,” Ilya says, frowning deeply and worriedly. “Zhenya, do not get in trouble. If I’m your babysitter—”

“You’re not my babysitter,” Geno tells him, and he gives him a curt wave as soon as his feet are jammed in his sneakers. “Thanks for the sushi, I’ll see you at dinner.”

It does take some sweet talking to get in, long enough that practice is certainly winding down by the time he makes it towards one of the benches. He’s delighted to find Sidney there, and Sidney’s face lights up as soon as he sees Geno coming. Geno wishes he were better at ignoring the swooping feeling in his stomach when he sees that, at keeping himself from finding the small boy he has visited five times in Sidney’s face, but it’s getting to be impossible to do either of those things.

“Hey, Geno,” Sidney says. He looks so much larger than usual, of course, in all of his gear compared to Geno’s track suit, and he looks happy, like he belongs here. He doesn’t so much as blink at Geno visiting him, and that makes Geno’s heart feel like it’s being squeezed a bit: Geno’s friendship is simply a matter of fact to him, no matter what situation they’re in.

“Hello Sid,” Geno says, smiling back at him. “Look good. Red your color.”

Sidney grins hard at him, raising one eyebrow. “It’s your color too, I think.” He laughs at his own joke, and Geno’s laughter quickly follows, and though there are people looking at them—someone taking a picture, maybe—he really doesn’t care.

“Want to wish you luck,” Geno tells him when they’ve both stopped laughing. He pokes his tongue out of his mouth and curls his lips into a grin. “Make silver dream come true.”

“Silver, ha,” Sidney says, shaking his head but unable to chase his smile away. “Try again.”

“You could win gold but you are not Russian,” Geno says, clucking in fake sympathy. “Too bad. Would make good Russian.”

“What, like it’s hard,” Sidney says. Geno slugs him lightly, laughing until Sidney laughs, too, and when they are eventually politely directed towards the locker room, where Geno has to leave Sidney, all the stares and everything is worth it anyway.

 

 

The offseason is longer than it’s felt in years, punctuated by trips to visit young Sidney and Mama joining him in Moscow for the first time in a while. “Sorry to cut in to your young person fun,” Mama tells him busily, bustling around his kitchen until it smells heavily of cabbage and has also revealed functions and appliances he hadn’t even known were there. She doesn’t sound sorry at all. “Your brother is going to drive me crazy, though, moping around about _her._ ”

Geno gives Oksana a significant, sorrowful look, and it only takes about a week for Oksana to smack a rough kiss on his lips, pat him on the ass, and say, “Okay. A few weeks? More than a month?”

“Will you come back to Pittsburgh with me?” Geno asks, because if not getting back together at the end of the offseason just seems kind of pointless to him. Oksana makes a face, apparently thinking about it, and then shrugs.

“We’ll see. Take care, Zhenya. Get rid of that woman before I do something drastic; I’m too beautiful for prison.”

“Funny, that’s what she says about you,” Geno says, and Oksana flicks on him the forehead and leaves.

Geno loves his mother a whole lot, but it’s hard not to notice that the kitchen stops smelling quite so wretched as soon as Oksana is gone, or her heavy, conversation-starting sighs at the dinner table that he avoids like landmines. It makes him grit his teeth and then stuff his face with food to keep from commenting or snapping at her or telling her to go _home_.

“Do you think you’re going to get a divorce?” he asks Denis after days of continuous tiptoeing, hearing Mama’s every thought on the subject and nothing from the man himself. But Denis just heaves a heavy sigh, proving once and for all that he is his mother’s son despite the fact that he favors his father in appearance.

“I don’t know. Things are complicated.”

“That’s—I don’t know how to help when you say things like that. That could mean anything.”

“It’s private.”

“I’m your brother, idiot. Nothing’s private.”

Denis is quiet for a few moments in which Geno thinks about going off on him, but any indignant words immediately evaporate from his mind when Denis eventually says, “She—Anna wants children. I’m—not sure.”

And there are lots of reasons for Denis to be unsure—he had never been too crazy about kids, too reserved and always a bit of a grump, even when he _was_ a kid. But it only takes Geno a split second to arrive at what must be the correct conclusion, evident in Denis’ awkward tone. “You’re afraid?”

He can practically hear Denis wince. “Yes. Zhenya—”

“It usually skips a generation,” Geno says in a rush, each word tripping on the next. He is thinking of their grandmother, who had died in rather hushed, not much discussed circumstances when Geno was barely 12. He had gotten to know her mostly through traveling, more so her traveling than his, and never with as much regularity as his visits with Sidney. All the important things he knows about time travel come from her. “And it might not even—having the gene is not a guarantee, so even if it’s in our family—”

“But there’s still a chance,” Denis says, firm and flat in that way of his. “You have to understand why I’m afraid of that chance, right? Of all people, you must be afraid, too.”

Whenever Geno has ever thought of children, it’s been in a very abstract, theoretical way: no blanks filled on how they would come to be, just something he knows he would like for himself. He had never liked to think about the possibility of passing the gene on, latching on to his grandmother’s warning that it usually skips a generation, like twins. That was always how she put it.

Delving into the practicalities of having children seemed too depressing. Logistically, starting a family would have to involve someone else, and there’s only ever been one woman so important to him. He and Oksana have never talked about it.

He has to wonder how much of this Mama knows, and he tries to devise a way to ask her over another dinner, trying not to lose his patience with how she talks about Anna. Mama loves Anna like a daughter six days out of the week, a marked contrast with her attitude towards Oksana, but she is viciously, stubbornly protective and it is hard for her to see reason beyond that.

“Mama,” Geno asks finally, when his food has gone cold and Mama has been scowling at him, close to rapping his knuckles with the salad tongs to make him start eating. “Has Denis talked to you about grandchildren?”

Mama’s face goes perfectly, heartbreakingly blank, her scowl crumpling. She heaves one of her signature sighs but this one, finally, is not pointed. It is genuine, tangible sorrow, thick and cutting Geno right to the bone. “He hasn’t said, but—oh, my stupid boy. He’s not as brave as you, Zhenya.”

Geno snorts, shaking his head ruefully. “Don’t be ridiculous. It has nothing to do with bravery. He wants to know that his children will have a normal life, and I don’t blame him. _Or_ Anna.”

His last comment is pointedly ignored, but Mama’s face has softened when she says, “It absolutely is about bravery. It’s about knowing that you’ll love your children no matter what kind of life they have, normal or otherwise. Your father and I were scared when we had you two, but we knew that. Denis should know but, bless him, he hasn’t quite caught on yet.”

Geno stares down at his food, turning that over. The idea of having a child and watching that child leave, over and over again—and the tortured, wretched looks his parents always had when he came back from traveling as a child, and they looked as though they had aged years while he had been in the past—it makes his stomach turn, the depressing reality of it suddenly vivid and awful. “But maybe that’s the problem,” Geno says quietly. “Maybe loving a child is the easy part. But losing them when you love them that much—”

“It is absolutely worth it,” Mama tells him. Her tone brooks no argument. “You’ll know that, too. I think you’ll know it sooner than Denis.” She wrinkles her nose, and Geno immediately feels lighter. “But I hope with someone more suitable than—”

“Our children would be beautiful,” Geno says, reaching out to cup his hand over hers. He imagines Oksana’s icy blue eyes widened on a round, young face and feels a little rush of sweet, painful happiness. “And you would love them to pieces.”

“It’s her genes we should all be worried about,” Mama mutters, and Geno laughs out loud, startled and appalled.

Denis and Anna eventually stalemate themselves back together, and together with Papa they come to Moscow to collect Mama. Geno isn’t quite sure what has been solved, is rather concerned that the answer is _nothing_ until Denis mentions looking into adoption offhandedly. “Later on, down the road, you know,” Denis says, looking distinctly uncomfortable, and even more so when Geno promises to help him with anything he needs, but he thanks Geno sincerely enough and quickly changes the subject.

His family heads home, and Geno takes a day or two with friends, contemplating, before he gets in touch with Oksana again. Training camp and Pittsburgh is only just around the corner, not a lot of time to bring up what he’s finally forced himself to think about, but it turns out to be just enough time.

“Have you ever thought about having children?” Geno asks Oksana one night, when they still smell like smoke from a club and there are more than a few bravery cocktails running through their veins.

Oksana’s shoulders hunch, sharp and bronzed where they stick out of her sparkly dress. She stares at Geno, first with her signature dry amusement, and then slowly with a certain amount of heartbreak when she realizes that he’s not kidding with her.

“Oh, Zhenya.”

“It’s a simple question,” Geno snaps, annoyed. Oksana sits down on the very edge of his black leather chaise lounge, the one she had picked out. She is still holding her purse, and she looks very grave.

Geno sits down on the black leather chair that _he_ had picked out, wishing foolishly he could turn back and see a Penguins logo on it.

“Of course I have,” Oksana says slowly. Her voice has become soft and gentle, like she’s a different person, and that’s how Geno knows something pretty awful is about to happen. “It’s something I’ve always wanted.”

“Okay,” Geno says, steeling himself a little and looking at her carefully. “So why do you look so sad?”

He immediately wants to take the question back; he hates asking stupid questions. Oksana’s look turns pitying, and he _hates_ that more than anything.

“Zhenya,” Oksana starts, and Geno has to shake his head fervently.

“It skips a generation, you know. From what I’ve heard. And some people don’t even—just having the gene doesn’t mean anything—”

“Or it could mean everything,” Oksana says, firmer now, more like herself. “Skipping a generation means nothing except bad news for our grandchildren. You couldn’t really want to do that to them.”

“I don’t—of course I don’t _want_ to—” but Oksana’s voice cuts him off, hard.

“We should stop this. I wasn’t expecting this, you know.”

Geno feels like he’s been dunked in an unnecessary ice bath, startled and _awful_ and surprised at how awful he feels. “You can’t mean—”

“I do mean. I didn’t think you were this selfish.”

“I’m not selfish. I’m not, it’s just—it’s only a risk, not a sure thing. I didn’t think _you_ were such a coward.”

“I think it’s pretty cowardly of you to even be asking _me_ this,” Oksana says, and Geno scoffs.

“Who else would I ask?”

“Someone you wanted to say yes,” Oksana tells him flatly, and that shuts Geno up pretty well, his mouth snapping shut as he swallows hard and stares down at his knees.

They are quiet for a few telling moments before Geno dares to ask, “Can we forget I said anything? Please?” He can see years with Oksana suddenly starting to evaporate, and whatever it was—off and on, just sex, just something that helped them socially, a harsher but easier love than the kind in the movies—he doesn’t want it to end, and he feels helpless to stop it.

“We really can’t,” Oksana says, and he only knows that she’s started to cry because she twitches her hand towards her face ever so slightly, like she wants to wipe the tears away but doesn’t want to clue him in.

“Please,” he says one more time, really just to say it, not expecting it to work. Oksana shakes her head slowly, clutches her purse in a way that makes Geno want to give her privacy. She’s never cried in front of him, ever, and he can tell it would make her deeply uncomfortable to do so.

The best and hardest thing about Oksana is that she never says she’s sorry. Geno is foolish enough to believe, for just a moment, that maybe she would, maybe she wants to and if Geno had just stayed—but he doesn’t stay. Geno blinks against stupid, irrational tears and when his vision clears again, he is behind the boating rack and Sidney’s chubby young face is smiling at him.

“Hi Geno,” he chirps, covering his eyes politely while Geno dresses. He has a split lip and his hair is gelled up, and when Geno gathers himself enough to mentally call up the list of dates, he thinks Sidney’s around 12 now. He’s playing the kind of hockey that will get his father banned continuously from rinks and that makes Geno’s blood boil with rage on his behalf. “Are we still playing hockey together?”

And for once, saying, “Yes, Sid,” doesn’t feel as satisfying as it usually does. Yes, he is still playing hockey with Sidney. For the next few years at least, that is all he will be doing: playing hockey with Sidney. For his entire life, that has been more than enough, that has been everything.

But when he returns to his empty Moscow apartment (and Oksana has never waited for him. He had not been expecting her to. It’s possible he was hoping she would, though), it occurs to him that _enough_ is not ideal. Geno wonders how Denis could ever be satisfied with just enough, thinks he’d always wanted more for Geno but not for himself, and accepts that he’ll never fully understand his brother. Geno _wants_ , and now that he’s faced with the grim reality that it’s likely that hockey will be all he ever has, he feels like his heart has been scraped raw.

Geno doesn’t bother to put on his own clothes before he goes to bed, just pulls the covers up high and tries to ignore the fact of his wet pillow.

 

 

“Okay,” Max says at dinner, and when everyone but Geno keeps ignoring him, he clears his throat obnoxiously and then bangs his fist on the table. “O _kay_. Listen, assholes.”

Flower flicks peas off his plate, right at Max’s face. His aim’s not great, though, and Geno watches Sidney put his hand on Flower’s wrist, stopping him. “Like this,” Sidney murmurs, demonstrating with his fingers and narrowing his eyes until a pea bounces right off the tip of Max’s nose, making him splutter and laugh. Geno grins at them even as he dreads what’s coming.

“I’m serious, listen, this is a thing we need to discuss,” Max says insistently. “This boy, right here, the one next to me.”

“Oh, that one,” Duper says, rolling his eyes and wrinkling his nose at Geno. “What’s so special about that boy?”

“Eat dick, Duper,” Geno says, smiling brightly. Sidney coughs and laughs, choking out water all over the tablecloth as Flower thumps his back and laughs at him.

“This boy,” Max says _loudly_ , basically yelling now. Geno resists the urge to drop his head to the table. “He is _single._ Very, really single, officially. A totally free man. Discuss.”

The table quiets for a few moments, and then Flower laughs again. “Yeah, for next five minutes.”

“No, no,” Max tells him, wagging his finger at Flower. “For good this time. Right Geno?”

Geno shrugs, embarrassed. Max hadn’t believed him at first either, and it had been kind of embarrassing and messy to convince him. There had been alcohol and maybe some crying neither of them will ever mention again, and at the end, before they passed out, Max said, “Man, I gotta figure out how to make it better. Let me think on it.”

This, he is pretty sure, is making it better. It’s a classic Max move: make it normal and funny and a load for the team to bear together. He thinks it’s what Sergei would’ve done, too, if he were still here.

“For good,” Geno repeats, figuring out what that means using context clues. “Not feel very good, but. Happens. Very much over.”

“A free man,” Duper says slowly, and then he shakes his head and points his beer at Max accusingly. “You are an asshole. Terrible friend.”

“What? I am not a terrible friend. I am a great friend.” Max slings his arm over Geno’s shoulders, shaking him a little. “It’s the truth. He’s free now.”

“Max, shut the fuck up,” Kuni says, his voice kind of soft. The different accent is welcoming, too, but he’s looking at Geno with way too much sympathy. Tanger, too, and all the way down the table really, enough that Geno is sure that Max’s plan might be backfiring.

Only Sidney looks totally unreadable, his face very blank. It’s almost like he’s avoiding looking at Geno, which is only weird because everyone else is staring at him. Geno makes himself look away, too, not in the mood to be unsettled by Sidney right now.

“Is okay,” Geno says eventually, shrugging again. “Happen in summer. Sad but happen, and best for me, really.”

“Oh God,” Duper says, sounding very dramatic and very concerned. “He’s _heartbroken._ Maxime, you are the worst and never forget it.”

Max starts squawking loudly in French. Geno thinks about asking what he’s saying but decides it’s ultimately pointless; everyone is looking at Geno like he’d just told them he has a terminal illness, and Geno doesn’t know what he’s dreading more, the pats on the back or the inevitable defamation of Oksana’s character.

Neither actually happens, though, at least while they’re all sober, because then Max suddenly curses in English and says, “Okay, fine, genius, what do we do for him?”

Duper contemplates Geno steadily for a while, but it’s Sidney who tilts his head to the side and then says, “Hey, you want another drink, G?”

Max whoops loudly and points at Sidney with two hands. “Yes, _yes,_ let’s get this boy drunk. Good captain, best captain, let’s do this.”

“We still eating,” Geno points out, but that just means they get started at the restaurant, and instead of heading straight back to the hotel, they make a stop at a local place that the waitress refers them to.

None of them have more than a few drinks, really. They have a game tomorrow and despite it being his suggestion, Sidney would kill them all if they got truly reckless. “Good thing HBO is not here yet, eh,” Tanger tells Geno at the bar, nudging his shoulder and watching Max challenge Duper with shots that Duper accepts placidly.

“Yes,” Geno says, making a face into his glass. “Good cameras not see cry.”

“Aw, Geno. Fuck her,” Cookie suddenly chimes in on his other side. Geno makes another face. “Go back in time and fuck Marilyn Monroe, you’ll feel better.”

“That’s _gotta_ be cheating,” Sidney mutters under his breath. Tanger and Cookie both stare at him, confused, but Geno starts laughing and finds he can’t stop. He stops when he realizes he’s a little transfixed by the small, pleased smile growing on Sidney’s face, and now Tanger and Cookie are staring at them both.

It’s typical breakup fare, really, which means that Max’s plan actually worked the way he had originally intended. The guys all talk shit until he tells them to stop. Then they wax poetic on the wonders of singlehood, kindly ignoring the fact that Geno has been enjoying those wonders off and on for years in spite of Oksana. Duper blatantly lies and tells him he wishes he was single; Sidney smacks him on the back of the head and threatens to tell on him, and then looks at Geno very flatly.

“I’m sorry, but they are all full of shit. Being single is the worst.”

“ _You_ are the worst,” Cookie says. Sidney rolls his eyes but otherwise ignores him, still looking at Geno.

“It sucks Geno, really though. It’s all—all eating pizza alone and having tons of leftovers you don’t really want, and always getting to watch what you want on TV so you don’t even really want to watch it anymore.” Sidney has his lecturing face on, his eyes like steel. Geno nods solemnly even as Max whistles in disbelief.

“What the fuck kind of depressing life do you have, Crosby? Leftover pizza is the shit,” Max says incredulously.

Sidney just barely flinches—Geno’s pretty sure the only other person who would catch that is Flower—but it’s enough to make him sit up a little straighter and lean around Tanger to pat Sidney’s arm.

“I eat your leftover pizza, Sid. It okay.”

Everyone bursts out into raucous cooing while Sidney splutters and blushes, shaking his head. “ _No_ , that’s not what I—ugh that’s not the _point_ —”

“I think we should head back,” Tanger cuts in almost gently, leaning in a little closer to Sidney and trying to hide his frown. “Curfew soon, for singles and marrieds. Good idea to go back.”

“Yeah,” Sidney says, looking grumpy, and Geno is agreeable. So Max’s routine protestations are waved off and they all start heading back to the hotel. Geno is slightly buzzed and can’t really tell if he feels more or less okay about Oksana compared to this morning.

There are days when all that he feels is okay, and then days where he is decidedly not okay. Most of all, it is always hard to tell whether or not the awful, gnawing feeling of sorrow in his gut is really over losing Oksana. He has the sneaking suspicion that what he truly lost was something he lost long ago, a barely-imagined future that he had only bothered to dream of in his spare time.

They share cabs back. Geno is in a cab with Sidney, who is apparently not quite comfortable with that. He keeps casting side glances at Geno, opening his mouth as if he is going to say something and then closing it and looking out the cab window. On his other side, Flower is dozing, and Geno would be fine with it if Sidney wanting to babble about the woes of singlehood some more. It might be soothing in a weird way.

He doesn’t, though. Sidney stays silent all throughout getting back to the hotel, up in the elevator, nodding goodnight to their teammates as they walk down the hall. Geno is looking ahead to the joined room he’ll share with Brooks, aware of the hall clearing out behind him, and he jumps a little when he turns near his room door and sees Sidney standing right behind him, frowning.

“Sid?” Geno asks. The gnawing feeling is back, oily and unpleasant.

Sidney’s frown deepens. He opens his mouth, closes it, then takes a big breath and says, “Okay. But what about your anchor?”

Geno groans, turning to thump his head lightly against the wall. “I’m not want to talk about this.”

“You don’t believe in it, do you?” Sidney says accusingly. Geno feels a weird rush of déjà vu, though he knows they’ve never had this particular conversation before. Sidney is speaking like they have, though, and now Geno knows this is something they will talk about when he visits Sidney in the past. “You don’t think you can have one.”

“Already have one,” Geno says, and Sidney’s eyes flash dangerously and he stares at the far wall, shaking his head. “Hockey. Good anchor.”

“Hockey ends.” The words are sharp and biting and ridiculously depressing from their source. Coming from Sidney, it sounds like a ludicrous statement, because how could hockey ever end for someone like him, with the way he’s playing? Geno can barely imagine it. Retirement for both he and Sidney feels like an entire lifetime away, and it’s only that thought that soothes the ache in him from knowing that hockey is all he’ll ever have.

“Long time from now. Not have to worry—”

“Maybe you don’t, but I do,” Sidney says, biting his bottom lip. “I worry all the time, Geno.”

That makes Geno feel uncomfortable, a bit achy, and also warm. He worries about Sidney worrying. He worries about how much he cares about Sidney, how hard it is to think of him as he is now and not want to kiss him breathless.

“Please. No worry,” Geno says pleadingly, but Sidney shakes his head again.

“Why didn’t it work? Why couldn’t you just—try?”

Because he didn’t want it to work, not really, and Oksana always knew that. But Geno doesn’t know how to tell Sidney that. Instead, he recalls what Oksana said, because it’s just as true. “Because I selfish, Sid.”

Sidney huffs out a disbelieving laugh. “You’re really not.”

Geno looks at Sidney’s face carefully, considers how badly he wants to kiss him, how he might be moments away from doing so against every bit of good judgment that lives in his body, and nods firmly. “Yes. Very selfish.”

When Sidney looks up at him, there really isn’t anything else that Geno can do besides kiss him.

Sidney makes a startled noise and grabs at Geno’s sweater, gripping it tightly and bracing against his arms just for a second, as if he is going to push Geno away. He doesn’t, though, making a softer noise, leaning up into the kiss and kissing back with urgency and purpose. Geno gets that pretty quickly. This is the third time they’ve done this, and it’s not any more okay than it was when Geno had a girlfriend or when Sidney was too drunk to think straight, but it finally feels like a time when something is going to _happen_ , like it has to happen.

And then the elevator doors ding open from all the way down the hall. Geno pulls away as soon as the sound reaches his ears, but the cursing that follows the sound means he wasn’t fast enough, and when he dares to look over, Tanger’s face is thunderous, his mouth set and mulish.

“Fuck’s sake,” he says. Still holding on to Geno, Sidney winces but doesn’t move away, instead looking at Tanger with wide, pleading eyes.

“Don’t be mad.”

“Oh fuck off,” Tanger says, and then he’s off and running in French, clearly furious. Geno can’t follow anything, only picks up on how Sidney’s shoulders go up around his ears as he answers in timid French of his own, how he lets Geno go belatedly and only relaxes marginally when Geno grabs at him again, wanting.

Eventually, though, Sidney says, “Okay,” and then “Goodnight,” in English, looking with those same wide eyes before he backs towards his door. Geno scrubs a hand over his face, frustrated, wanting desperately to follow and yet logically aware of what an awful idea that would be, and then turns to face Tanger with a grim resignation.

“I will _kill_ you,” Tanger tells him with promise, and Geno rolls his eyes.

“Always much drama French guys. No one on floor but us. We just drink a little, sad because single, don’t—”

“Shut up, shut up, no,” Tanger says viciously, and he actually raises his hand. Geno blinks, and finally starts wondering what he’s missing—he doesn’t think Tanger would ever actually hit him and he doesn’t, runs the hand he’d raised through his hair and presses his lips together in a scowl instead. But maybe it had been a thought to. And maybe Geno doesn’t actually understand why Tanger is mad.

Then Tanger says, “You cannot keep doing this to him, no,” and Geno is _positive_ he doesn’t understand.

“Doing what,” Geno says, slow and careful. Tanger snorts out an angry breath and shakes his head, before looking at Geno just as carefully.

“You are drunk, sad about Oksana. You care about Sidney but the not the same way Sidney cares about you.”

That feels like a punch in the gut, unpleasant and jarring. The same kind of guilt he’d felt the first moment he’d ever learned that he had started visiting Sidney in the past when he was a child has come creeping back, and he doesn’t want to put together what Tanger is telling him. “What—what way? He my teammate—”

“He loves you a lot,” Tanger says. His voice is very soft now, and sad. “Not like a teammate. Don’t tell me you are teammates again. And don’t tell me you love him too, because it’s not the same.”

Geno does love Sidney. He loves Sidney the way you’re supposed to love a teammate, and he wants him so much more than that. It had never occurred to him that Sidney would feel any differently, that he _could_ feel differently about Geno of all people, but maybe it should’ve. Sidney said that Geno ruined his life, and after Sidney promised he didn’t mean it, Geno could brush it off. And now he can’t. Now the words are echoing in his head, twisted up with Oksana’s insistence that he is selfish.

He’s _more_ than selfish because he still wants Sidney.

Tanger is talking again, voice still soft, every word hammering the sharp hurt lodged in his heart deeper and deeper. “He’s loved you for years, so you can’t—I won’t tell anyone.” Geno hears _I won’t tell Flower_ because he knows Flower would actually make good on Tanger’s threats and kill him. “But you can’t do this. I won’t let you.”

“I—” Geno starts, but he can’t get anything else out. Not a promise that he won’t, or an apology, or some sort of thanks or rebuke for digging this up and making sure Geno knows everything.

“Okay,” he says eventually, but it doesn’t feel like he’s agreeing to anything. It’s more of an acknowledgment; the feelings he has for Sidney, the way he thinks about him, it’s even worse than he thought. It’s a terrible, awful idea to pursue, the ultimate in selfishness. “Going to bed now,” Geno adds, and Tanger doesn’t look remotely satisfied, but he nods stiffly anyway, and lets Geno turn into his room door.

Max had called him a free man, but Geno doesn’t think he’s really ever been free in his life. And now he knows that Sidney’s not free, either, that when he was a child, Geno connected them and it’s lasted until now. It’s devastating to think of, to think that Sidney loves him like Oksana did, that maybe Sidney knows like Oksana did that Geno will always leave him, will never be able to help it.

Sidney loves him, and all Geno can really wonder as he falls asleep that night is _why._

 

 

He can’t look at young Sidney the same way after that. Especially now that he is officially a teenager, starting to grow into the young man that Geno knows. He is becoming _his_ Sidney, and that is terrifying.

Geno is careful. He doesn’t know when it started; Tanger said years but obviously couldn’t know how many years there are between Sidney and Geno. No one knows but the two of them. He doesn’t want Sidney to fall in love with someone who will always leave him, who can’t love him back as much as he loves hockey. Geno wishes he could change it.

He can’t change the past, though. That’s one of the first things he’d learned about time travel. So often he is just an observer, unable to interact much with the people or places or times he has to visit. Talking with young Sidney the way he has has been the most of it, and while it is still a safer place in the past to land, he can’t help thinking about the damage he could be doing without meaning to, and he starts to dread it.

It is impossible to avoid or ignore the Sidney in the present, though. The HBO cameras come around and they are lucky enough to capture the monstrous, ridiculous season Sidney is having, the kind that makes Geno believe in crazy, wondrous things. Geno has a front row seat to what Sidney is doing to the league and it makes him break out in goosebumps sometimes, makes his stomach tight and hot.

There is no denying his attraction to Sidney, not when he’s playing like this. Geno knows he’s a completely hopeless case when the terrible mustache growing on top of Sidney’s lip isn’t even a turnoff. That mustache means points. It means that Sidney is dominating and Geno is unbearably attracted to what Sidney’s doing on the ice. He never really stops wanting to touch him or kiss him, and it’s painful.

In a fight, Oksana once told Geno that he really, really likes martyring himself, and he wonders if the way he’s resisting and keeping his distance with Sidney counts as that. Mostly he’s trying not to be selfish. Really, though, he’s coming to terms with the fact that he’s going to fail, that knowing Sidney loves him and deserves better isn’t going to be enough to keep him away.

Before he stops resisting, though, Sidney’s dominance comes to an end. It could be a relief if it happened any other way, but Sidney hits his head twice and is officially knocked out of playing.

At first, nobody but Sidney seems to know how bad it’s going to be. He disappears from the team and lets the official word come down: a concussion, first maybe a week out, then longer. He doesn’t correct anybody, doesn’t clarify, but when Geno texts Sidney to ask him if he needs anything, Sidney calls him.

“It’s bad,” he says point blank, and Geno swallows hard, almost regretting his text.

“Doctors say—”

“I don’t really care about the doctors,” Sidney snaps. He sounds crabby and distinctly unhappy. Geno aches for him. “I mean, I know it’s bad. I know it’s going to be a while before I play again.”

Geno gets that pretty easily. “I tell you.”

“You never told me specifics,” Sidney says, his voice distant, the way it always is when he’s thinking back to the past with Geno. He also sounds deeply tired, a little gravelly. “You told me the most important thing, though. You told me that I would play again. That’s all I really need to know. And why would you tell me that unless you thought I needed to hear it?”

That makes sense, but it still makes Geno unhappy. He doesn’t like that Sidney would ever need to hear that, would ever doubt that he’d play again. “Of course you play again. Not need to know future, know that always.”

Sidney goes quiet for a second, and his voice is small when he says, “It’s really bad, Geno.”

Geno thinks about asking if Sidney needs anything, then thinks about Sidney tipsily complaining about being single and having too much leftover pizza and decides not to bother asking. He just heads over to Sidney’s, letting himself in through Mario’s front gate and practically digging his heels in at the front door of the guest house, when Sidney opens the door and blinks out at him.

Then Sidney smiles, small and pale, and Geno is so, so fucked.

“Hi,” Geno says a little hesitantly, before clearing his throat and rolling his eyes at himself. “Want hang out, let me in.”

“We can’t do much,” Sidney warns him, not stepping back fast enough, so Geno has to push past him and inside. “I can’t watch TV, I can read for a little bit but it gives me a headache, I can’t play video games because they make me nauseous—”

“Stop,” Geno says sharply, swallowing hard. His chest hurts a little. “Shut up. Not have to entertain me. I entertain you.”

Sidney narrows his eyes at him, long enough that Geno starts to sweat, before he asks, “How?”

Geno shrugs and pastes on his most charming small. “My company.”

“What does _that_ mean,” Sidney says, and Geno really has no idea, but he shrugs again and makes himself comfortable, his shoes off and his jacket thrown over a chair and happy with the fact that Sidney lets him.

He looks around the guest house curiously. He’s only been here a handful of times and in all of those times he’s watched movies or played video games with Sidney, usually with other guys around. It’s a little weird to be with him here alone. It’s stupid, probably, considering how his thoughts about Sidney have gone lately, but it also feels like he doesn’t have much of a choice. Geno can’t leave Sidney here alone. He just won’t.

His eyes catch on a stack of board games shoved under Sidney’s coffee table and he grins and goes to his knees. Sidney says, “Geno, what,” and then groans when he sees Geno pulling out Monopoly and setting it pointedly on the table. “Oh no, that’s an awful idea.”

“What, no. Good idea.”

“I take Monopoly really seriously,” Sidney says carefully, as if Geno is meeting him for the first time.

Geno humors him, though, nodding slowly and making eye contact as Sidney eases himself down on the floor next to Geno and chews his bottom lip worriedly. “Me too. I am very serious banker.”

“What, why do you get to be banker, we should roll for it.” They roll, and Geno grins when he gets to be banker, grins harder when Sidney glares at him. “No _cheating._ ”

“I’m never cheat,” Geno says solemnly, putting his hand over his heart and sticking his tongue out at Sidney.

Geno has never actually finished a game of Monopoly, and this game is no exception; it ends with Sidney squawking in outrage and pelting him with hotels when Geno gets caught trying to help himself to a quick loan. Geno is laughing too hard to really mind when Sidney nails him in the eye with one of the little plastic pieces, and he doesn’t really mind it at all when Sidney moves around the coffee table to shove at him, climbing on top of him to wrestle the fake paper money away.

He is careful, though. He can’t help being careful, can’t help holding on to Sidney as gently as he can, gripping his wrists lightly even though Sidney feels solid and heavy against him. He looks the same, a little paler, his eyes with dark circles under them and his lips chewed raw, but his hurt isn’t visible and it makes Geno all the more wary, cautious.

Sidney stops struggling when Geno stops laughing, biting his lip again. He studies Geno’s face, wriggles his wrists until Geno lets him go too easily, and frowns deeply.

“Why’d you come over?”

Geno bites back a groan. “Want check on you.”

“Duper checked on me this morning. Tanger and Catherine are coming over for dinner on Sunday. It’s not the same but it’s still—you don’t have to feel responsible for me, Geno. I’m an adult.” The unspoken _now_ hangs heavily in the air between them, and Geno thumps his head lightly back on Sidney’s carpet.

“I’m think about—think about too much leftover pizza,” Geno says slowly. Sidney huffs, shaking his head and moving to climb off, but Geno grabs at him. “Not young Sid. Big Sid. And I just—want be here with you.”

“Why,” Sidney whispers, eyes searching for the answer on Geno’s face. Geno looks back at him just as searchingly, finding what he’s always found, what he’s never really understood until now. Sidney is waiting for him, and even though it’s wrong, Geno can’t keep him waiting any longer.

“Because I’m selfish,” Geno whispers back.

When Sidney leans down and brushes his lips cautiously against Geno’s, he tastes inevitable.

 

 

It’s weird, at first, to suddenly be able to touch Sidney and for that to be okay, at least in the context of just the two of them and in the present. There is still that guilt. It feels unshakeable.

They don’t get very far that first day; they kiss for longer than they ever have before, longer than all three other kisses combined, until Sidney is squinting and there are lines in his mouth from pain, and Geno kisses him at his temple and whispers, “Head hurt?”

“I’m fine,” Sidney insists, but he’s flinching from the dim lamplight on, the outside falling dark around them. He’s not fine, tense on top of Geno, and it takes Geno a few moments to really gather the courage to reach up and rub at the back of Sidney’s neck, to gently place his palm over his eyes until he feels him relax just a little. “Geno,” Sidney sighs, and Geno hums and cups his cheek, his hand tingling with a weird thrill of being so intimate.

Sidney insists they get up off the floor, and Geno insists he turn off the light and start heading home. “No, come on,” Sidney says, grabbing at Geno’s arms when they reach for his shoes. “Don’t go yet.”

“Should sleep,” Geno says, kissing Sidney on the forehead and resisting the urge to pinch himself. “Rest brain so it get better fast.”

“It’s not going to get better fast, I told you,” Sidney says. He sounds petulant and unhappy, and Geno’s eyes haven’t adjusted to the darkness yet but he can hear the frown in Sidney’s voice. “I’ve got loads of time, loads of headaches. I have to get used to it.”

“Shouldn’t cheat,” Geno grumbles, and Sidney huffs and leans into him blindly, tucking his nose into Geno’s neck. “Make you crazy, like know everything.”

“ _You’re_ making me crazy,” Sidney tells him, and Geno has to kiss him deeply once more, twice more, before he can start coaxing Sidney to bed alone.

“I thought you were selfish,” Sidney gripes when Geno turns down his bedcovers and stands pointedly next to the bed until Sidney starts climbing in. Geno smooths the covers over him gently, wincing when Sidney grabs on to his hand and doesn’t let go, like now that Geno had given him tacit permission to keep touching, he’s just not going to stop, greedy for it. Geno knows the feeling, wishes he could feel more relief at finally giving himself permission.

“I am,” Geno says simply. “Sleep.”

“You’ll come back,” Sidney says, voice tilted up into a question, and then he huffs at himself and adds, “Or I’ll just go to you. It’s been _years_ , Geno, Jesus Christ.”

“Can wait a little longer. Wait until you feel good.”

“You can make me feel good.”

Geno shudders, his stomach dipping as he wonders how true that is. “I hope.”

“Don’t go humble on me, idiot,” Sidney says. He threads his fingers through Geno’s and squeezes them tightly, strong and firm and demanding. “Come back tomorrow night. Please.”

“Okay,” Geno breathes out, feeling defeated and triumphant at the same time.

He brings dinner when he goes back to Sidney’s the next night, and a whole lot of nerves he wishes he could get rid of. Sidney looks uninterested in eating for once but does so gamely, and Geno is opening his mouth to ask him how he feels when Sidney cuts him off. “No. Shut up. I don’t have a headache.”

“Feel sick?” Geno asks, and Sidney makes a face and shakes his head.

“I’m okay. You’re not getting out of this.” Suddenly, Sidney pales a little, and he looks down at half-finished plate of food, frowning a little. “I mean, unless you don’t want to. I told you, you don’t have to feel responsible for me—”

Geno cuts him off by leaning all the way around Sidney’s kitchen table and kissing him hard, insistent and reassuring. “You think—” Geno mumbles against Sidney’s mouth, pressing a firm kiss to his cheek. “—I can think of young Sid and want you like this?”

“I don’t know,” Sidney says. He sounds breathless, and Geno swallows more of his breaths, liking the way he sounds. “I don’t know, you kissed me and then we stopped and we kept doing that and I just—I don’t know what you _want_ —”

“Want you for while,” Geno says, swiping his tongue cautiously against Sidney’s mouth, his stomach warming up when Sidney’s opens for him. “Want you _so_ much, want stay with you—”

Sidney gasps, and captures his lips, and then it’s like getting dunked in ice water when Sidney disappears.

Geno blinks and looks around, and he doesn’t think he’s ever felt so devastated when he sees that he’s traveled. He’s _freezing_ , he’s outside but surrounded by hockey fans, and it takes only a few seconds to figure out that he’s just two weeks in the past, on the first day of 2011.

Heinz Field ignores him when he drops to his knees, because he doesn’t want to see Sidney’s hit again. But he sees it, and knows he was meant to see it, and it makes him shake, makes him feel sick.

Worse than that is watching Sidney play after the hit. He has to watch the whole rest of the game, and what he watches makes him ache—at the end when Flower gets pulled and Sidney is meant to be the sixth man on the ice, it takes him a good 20 seconds to understand what he’s supposed to do. He clambers over the boards and it’s clumsy, wrong, and Geno’s stomach rolls until the final buzzer sounds.

Then he is back in the warmth of Sidney’s guest house and almost immediately pulled into Sidney’s arms, still on his knees, Sidney babbling in his ear. “Are you okay? Are you—Geno—did you—”

“Okay,” Geno grunts, but Sidney’s hands are all over him, as if he has to check. Geno understands; he gets his hands all over Sidney, too, and knows he can’t let go, knows when he cups Sidney’s face in his hands and looks at him that he’s not going to leave him if he can help it. “Sorry, sorry.”

“Fuck,” Sidney says, shaking his head. “Don’t be _sorry_.”

He wants to keep saying sorry, for what he’s not sure, but Sidney kisses him before he can, grabbing him tightly and moving in so close it’s like he’s trying to climb into Geno’s skin. Geno is still naked, chilled and Sidney is warm, warm in just his sweats, radiating heat and safety. He kisses Sidney back suddenly feeling secure in the knowledge that he won’t be leaving him again for the next day at least.

It is this reassurance that makes it easier and almost necessary to allow Sidney to guide him towards his bedroom, to keep the lights off but ease back towards the bed. “We don’t have to—” Sidney starts, but he’s shaking, and he’d waited like always, and Geno doesn’t want to wait any longer.

“Yes,” Geno says firmly, punctuating it with a firm kiss and a tug at Sidney’s sweatshirt.

The nerves come back when Sidney’s chest is bare, when he’s just in boxers and all warm, flushed skin and wandering hands between them. Geno swallows hard, pulling back from the kiss, looking down at the outline of Sidney’s dick just visible in the dark, and is somehow more intimidated by that than his own hard-on clearly visible. He is used to being naked around Sidney; it’s seeing Sidney naked like this that feels new.

Sidney gets it, though, pulling away when Geno does and making eye contact. “Slow,” he says carefully, rubbing his thumbs over Geno’s knuckles. Geno huffs, laughing a little.

“Not a virgin.” He’s never been with a man, though, and he is almost sure that Sidney knows that.

Sidney just smiles at him, leaning in and kissing Geno gently. “Neither am I. I still want to go slow.”

“Okay,” Geno says shakily, breathing out carefully.

Slow means that Sidney tilts him back against the pillows and climbs on top of him, straddling his waist still half-dressed and rubbing his hands down Geno’s chest. He thumbs at his nipples with a thoughtful frown, and when Geno doesn’t react, moves his hands further down to slide across his ribcage, careful and tender. Geno places his hands on Sidney’s hips and rubs him there, fingers slipping under the waistband of his shorts to touch the soft skin, needing to touch, but letting Sidney touch as much as he wants, to touch everywhere.

It’s a while before Sidney dares to go lower than his waist, scooting down his legs and rubbing firmly at Geno’s lower belly. He follows his hands with his mouth, kissing hard and sucking at the skin lightly until Geno twitches and runs a hand through Sidney’s hair, keeping it there.

He frames Geno’s cock with his two hands, looking at it for a while, letting out a shaky breath over it. Geno waits, arousal heavy and burning in his gut, warming him from the inside out, but when Sidney touches him there he is still hesitant, not grabbing but running his fingers down the veiny underside of his dick as if experimenting. It’s sweet and torturous and not very Sidney, and Geno finds his nerves swallowed up in impatient want, need that makes his hips twitch up and his fingers clench in Sidney’s hair.

“Sid,” he breathes out, and Sidney answers him by licking at his cock, making a circle with two fingers and slipping it over the head as he slides his tongue up and down cautiously, like he’s tasting. Geno’s thighs shake a little and he groans out, shaking his head against the pillow Sidney had pushed him towards, and he has to say “Sid _ney_ ,” rather insistently before Sidney takes his dick in his mouth.

It doesn’t stay there, but for a few moments it is hot, slick and wonderful, Sidney’s mouth practiced and deft as it bobs up and down. His tongue flicks carefully at Geno’s slit and places sucking kisses all the way down to the base and Geno is groaning again, shaking, grabbing for whatever of Sidney he can reach and feeling weirdly unsatisfied that it isn’t much.

He takes the opportunity, when Sidney pulls his mouth off and replaces it with his hand, to haul Sidney up and kiss him hard as Sidney jerks him off with purpose. Sidney kisses him back with the same desperation he’s showing as he rocks his erection against Geno’s hip, but he never falters in his grip.

He twists his palm over the head of Geno’s dick and does it again when it makes Geno moan, licking into his mouth at the same time. Sidney’s patient, though, drawing out Geno’s moans intermittently, his fingers going from tight and determined to light and searching in a second, until Geno grabs at his wrist and growls against his lips and wants to come more than he wants Sidney to learn.

“Please,” he says when Sidney hesitates, and then Sidney never stops, his hand speeding up and firming up, his strokes evenly paced and driven. He pulls Geno’s orgasm from him in twists and tugs and in Geno’s moans, low and rumbling against Sidney’s warm cheek.

Geno’s still breathing hard with it when Sidney starts pulling away, wiping his hand off on the bedcovers. Geno clamps down on his wrist, shaking his head and finding Sidney’s mouth almost blindly in his haze, and he really feels rather than hears Sidney mumbling, “I’m okay, you don’t have to—”

“Shut up,” Geno mumbles back, and he moves his hand from Sidney’s wrist to his cock, rubbing it without hesitation through his boxers and feeling Sidney shudder. It takes more coordination than he’s usually capable of after sex, but Geno is able to work his hand inside and feel Sidney bare, his dick hot and slick in his hold.

He feels clumsy and inexpert jerking Sidney off, trying to replicate what Sidney had done for him, but it’s only a few more moments before Sidney makes high, broken, “Ah, ah,” noises and seizes up against him. He comes wet and warm over Geno’s fist and relaxes slowly, twitching against him and barely managing to kiss him, his mouth as lax and weak as Geno feels.

They sigh together, and Geno leans close to press their foreheads together and ask, “Feel good?”

“Yes,” Sidney says, and he tries to kiss him but lands on Geno’s nose. “Really good. Perfect.”

Geno snorts, can’t help it, and shakes his head, kissing Sidney’s nose, too. “You crazy. I do better.”

“Next time,” Sidney says, and he sighs again before easing out of Geno’s hold. He stands up next to the bed and slides his boxers off all the way, and it’s still dark but Geno watches him anyway, can almost see Sidney blushing as he turns back to the bed. “Do you mind?”

“See you naked all the time,” Geno says, smiling a little at Sidney’s sudden shyness and understanding it all too well. “Come here.”

“Get under the covers,” Sidney tells him bossily, and he helps Geno under and slides in next to him, still like a space heater in his arms. He squirms around a little, fussing with his pillow, but he turns to face Geno quickly enough, studying him pretty obviously, until Geno wants to shut his eyes.

He doesn’t, though, bravely meeting Sidney’s gaze. He should be prepared for Sidney’s next question but isn’t, feels the answer stab at his gut again. “Where’d you go this time?”

Geno doesn’t answer with words, finds that he can’t. Instead, he kisses Sidney on the forehead and closes his eyes, focusing on the feel of him solid and warm against him, here in the present.

 

 

Geno hates losing five games to a sinus infection, not least because it means he pops into the past more often, now in shorter increments but each one featuring Sidney getting hit, sometimes by Steckel, sometimes by Hedman.

It’s three more handjobs and finally a complete blowjob before he admits to Sidney that that’s where he’s going, and Sidney takes the news gravely, frowning hard and leaning back against his pillows. They had tried the lights on until Sidney was squinting too much and Geno couldn’t stand it, couldn’t stop closing his eyes and seeing Sidney crumpled on the ice, and turned the lights off again.

“You know what it sounds like,” Sidney says eventually, thoughtfully, and Geno wracks his brain but eventually shakes his head, not comprehending. Sidney looks like he regrets saying anything, but gamely clarifies. “It sounds like Eddie Shore and Ace Ba—”

“ _No_ ,” Geno says, his chest going tight. “Not the same. Not _close._ ”

“Recurring visits are awful, I know, but pretty common,” Sidney says, sounding like he’s reciting from a textbook. The truth is that Sidney probably knows more about time travel than Geno does, but Geno hates thinking about why, hates Sidney growing up wishing he could fix Geno before they’d even properly met as teammates.

He hates the thought of Eddie Shore, cured by means that can’t cure Geno, but tortured most of his life by Ace Bailey. Geno isn’t tortured; Sidney isn’t torture for him. It’s not the same.

“They’re not the only case, they’re just one of the most famous examples,” Sidney continues, oblivious to the fact that Geno wants him to stop talking. “I’m not saying it’s the same, either, just—”

“Maybe I’m supposed to cheat more,” Geno cuts in brusquely, leaning in close to Sidney and cupping a hand to the side of his face, trying to smooth out the ever-present pained lines at the corners of his eyes. “Maybe I say to young Sid, watch out Steckel. Don’t play Tampa.”

Sidney makes a face that Geno can feel, and shakes his head. “But—you can’t change the past. Or in this case, the future. It happened already. We can’t fix it now.”

“Want to fix,” Geno says, and he hopes Sidney knows it’s not just because he keeps seeing it.

“I know,” Sidney says, and then, “Me too,” and Geno has to bite down on a frustrated groan, because Sidney’s not talking about his concussion.

“It’s okay,” Sidney says eventually, voice firm and resolute. “You’ll start playing again and you’ll tear it up because you’ve got to keep what I had going, and then you won’t travel as much.”

“Yes,” Geno agrees, thinking about going back to playing with some satisfaction, squeezing Sidney tight to him in reassurance. “Yes, good.”

He only gets one more game, though, and just long enough for Tyler Myers to take him out, for his knee to explode with the kind of pain he just knows is bad, really bad, worse than anything he’s had in his career.

He passes in and out of the present after that, sometimes literally, always between pain and drugs and watching Sidney go down. When Geno is lucid and aware that a torn ACL and MCL will keep him out for a long time, the whole season, he is morbidly grateful that the only place he goes in the past now is to the Winter Classic or the Tampa game. Hockey is still safe, even when it hurts him.

In the past is the only place he sees Sidney for a while, for a few weeks as his family spills into the States and fills up his house to take care of him. Sidney texts him, calls him twice but keeps his distance until Geno has to have surgery. Then he shows up with flowers for Mama and Monopoly under one arm, looking determined and a little scared and very awkward.

“You can be the banker,” he says, and Geno just wants to hold him.

He doesn’t, though, because Mama is there cooing over the flowers and Papa is shaking Sidney’s hand in thanks, asking him about his head through points and gestures. Geno translates that Sidney is feeling well, and it’s a while before they all get their points across that Sidney really is fine, no he doesn’t want tea, he shouldn’t have any cookies or pelmeni but okay, maybe he’ll have a few.

They are finally left alone in Geno’s bedroom, Monopoly spread out carefully on the bed between them but ignored as Sidney swallows hard and seems to steel himself. “I’m sorry,” he says miserably, and Geno is starting to come down from his last round of painkillers but is still high enough that smacking Sidney with the Monopoly board seems like an okay idea. He’s reaching for it when Sidney continues. “I didn’t know when it was going to happen. I wrote it down in the book and I told you to be careful but I didn’t know—”

“You are crazy,” Geno says, shaking his head. “Not your fault I don’t cheat.”

“You should have. You should have told me the date and the game so I could tell you to watch out—”

“Can’t change future,” Geno says solemnly. “Never work.”

“Okay, but—you still have to be careful, because you’re going to travel and see me and I’ll be 14, and you’ll be in a lot of pain and I’ll be—I’ll help you but—”

And Sidney’s voice is cut off abruptly as Geno leaves the present.

 

 

Sidney looks eerily like his 14-year-old self when Geno returns to the present, sweating and shaking and still clenching the air where young Sidney’s hand had been. Sidney looks terrified, very pale, and his mouth is pinched like he’s in pain, but he springs into action as soon as Geno reappears on the bed.

“We have to get the brace back on,” Sidney says. His hands are shaking a lot. “And get your knee elevated, and get the electric blanket—”

“Nurse still here?” Geno asks through gritted teeth, the pain making him dizzy and Sidney’s anxiety making it worse. “She can do—”

“I can do it!” Sidney snaps, and then he freezes, his eyes going wide. They close and Sidney sways just a little, but it’s enough that Geno starts yelling for Katya, who is paid to take care of Geno’s knee and should take a look at Sidney, too.

It’s an easy enough affair to get the brace back and Geno’s clothes on and Sidney in a chair with his face in his hands, politely accepting a glass of juice from Mama and withstanding being fussed over with far more grace than Geno ever manages. Geno gets morphine for all his trouble, which makes him feel wonderful and untroubled except for how unhappy Sidney is, and when the room clears and the dust settles he pats the side of the bed where the Monopoly board had been until Sidney sighs and climbs onto it.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and Geno manages to slap him with a flopped, careless hand. “I’m useless.”

“Shut _up_ ,” Geno growls, but he makes his voice soften when he meets Sidney’s wide, unhappy eyes. “Not useless. Warm for me.”

“You have the heated blanket,” Sidney says, poking it but edging closer. Geno rolls his eyes and tucks Sidney in against him.

“Sid best blanket. Always warm for me.”

“Not on _purpose_ ,” Sidney whines. Geno shuts him up with a sloppy kiss, and he falls asleep with his mouth on Sidney’s collarbone, drooling.

When he wakes up, Sidney is gone but there is a text message promising him that he’ll be back, and Geno is happy about that despite Mama’s clucking questions. Mama doesn’t outright _say_ anything judgmental, but Geno thinks it’s a matter of time—she had been quiet about Oksana, once. It feels like a very long time ago, and Geno is startled to realize that it was.

No, Mama doesn’t stay quiet, because Sidney keeps coming to visit Geno. He’s always pretty awkward about it, and he never touches Geno if his parents are in the room, which is incredibly frustrating because privacy is hard to come by, but Geno gets it. He appreciates it, actually. He is not ready to think about this thing with Sidney outside of anyone but he and Sidney, and certainly not ready to talk about it.

As always, Mama runs out of patience before he runs out of stubborn will and corners him while bringing him breakfast in bed. It’s really not fair, because he can’t even escape without great difficulty and she’s doing something _nice_ for him so he’d be a terrible son if he told her to go away.

“That boy,” Mama says, and Geno groans and wonders if he can drown in oatmeal. “He’s here a lot. More than Maxime. More than the big, sweet stupid one.”

“Jordy,” Geno says helpfully. She knows his name, she’s just being a dick. She knows Sidney’s name too but “that boy” certainly helps get her point across.

“Are we going to talk about that?”

“No?” Geno says, and then he clears his throat and pushes away the painkiller fog and says more firmly, “No. We are not.”

Mama smiles a little. “I think we are.”

“You can talk, I can listen, that’s usually how these things go,” Geno says, and that sets Mama off about how _that boy_ is too familiar and _that boy_ seems to have _ideas_ and _that boy_ is very nice and has very good intentions but other people are going to have _ideas_ and that would not be good right now.

It’s nothing Geno doesn’t know and nothing he wasn’t expecting. Mama knows nothing about Sidney, not really. She knows he likes peanut butter and thinks that’s absurd, and somehow she hasn’t realized that whatever _ideas_ Sidney has are actually reciprocated in the barest sense of the word, in that Geno wants him back and maybe loves him in a more complicated way than previously thought. But it’s all complicated because Sidney is a man, and Geno has never liked men before, and letting Sidney jerk him off _carefully_ , so carefully is new and odd and he doesn’t know that Mama or Papa or Denis or anyone would ever really approve.

It’s new. It feels big already and it is but it’s also really new, no matter how long they’ve been waiting. It almost feels like they’ll have to wait some more, because they are both injured and both away from the team and sometimes Geno is almost grateful for that, as much as he misses them. He is glad to be healing almost alone with Sidney, to have whatever he has with Sidney in the bubble of quiet within his bedroom, fast and dirty and Sidney leaving too quickly because of his parents.

“Your parents don’t like me, do they?” Sidney asks him once, wiping his hand off on a towel and then making a face at the towel like he doesn’t know what to do with it, will have to burn the evidence. It’s almost funny, even though it makes Geno sad, too. Sidney is acting like a teenager again and Geno doesn’t like that he does that to him.

“They like you,” Geno says carefully. “Think you good hockey player, good friend.”

Sidney snorts. “The other day your mom made me tea because I had a headache and she put it in a cardboard cup that I swear to God she must’ve bought just for that and literally pushed me out the door.”

“Think you need rest.”

“I wasn’t wearing shoes, Geno. It just snowed!”

“She does this,” Geno says, thinking back on all the shit Oksana had gone through, years of it that seem so pointless now. He can’t imagine why Oksana put up with it for so long, why it never really bothered her, until he thinks about it more and decides it was because she didn’t really care.

Sidney’s lips are pressed together and he looks way too unhappy for someone who just jerked them both off with their dicks pressed together, slick with lube and pre-come and then their come, a mess between them. Geno wants to make him come again, so his mouth will fall open and his limbs will go lax like they’re supposed to, and maybe he’ll stay over again, even though that’s a terrible idea because Mama will probably make him breakfast and spit in it.

Mama is objectively terrible, and Geno has always known this. He loves her in spite of it, and he wants to explain this to Sidney but really doesn’t know how. “She is like this, protective. You not good Russian girl, so—”

“I come over too much,” Sidney says worriedly, shaking his head, and Geno feels immediately alarmed, a protest already growing on his tongue, even though it’s probably true. Sidney is over _all_ the time, almost every day, and it’s enough that the other teammates who come by to visit Geno have noticed. Geno is pretty sure the only reason Tanger hasn’t kicked his ass yet is because Geno’s still pretty immobile; he kind of looks forward to the day he gets far enough in his PT that the ass-kicking he has coming can be administered.

“Papa like you,” Geno says firmly, a little desperately. It’s true, though. Papa loves the whole team, really, from Sidney to Tangradi, top to bottom. Papa is not oblivious but has always been stubborn in the opposite way as his mother; he has always let Geno handle his own problems, insistent upon not exerting his own influence.

“I should—maybe I should go home for a while—”

“No,” Geno says, swallowing hard. He immediately feels guilty—maybe Sidney would be happier home, with his own family that doesn’t throw him out of the house in his socks—but he wants Sidney here with him. Every time he goes to the past and watches Steckel snap Sidney’s head back, he wants to touch Sidney in the present right away, shaking with the force of the want.

“I should,” Sidney says quietly, but he settles down against Geno when he tugs, so careful of his knee, not even complaining that Geno had been too lazy to go beyond a sponge bath before and still smells like their sex on top of that.

He should, and Geno closes his eyes and kisses Sidney’s forehead and keeps him here instead, because he is selfish.

 

 

Geno gets better, moving around more and more, handling the crutches with more ease. He heads to home games and a few practices with Sidney, who is attempting to drive because he’s sick of cabs. He spends a very tense few car rides in the backseat with Mama while Papa chatters aimlessly in the passenger seat at Sidney about how nice his car is, ignoring that Sidney can’t possibly understand and is just smiling weakly.

The Penguins are attempting to punch their way into the playoffs and Sidney doesn’t really approve, Geno knows, but doesn’t say anything because he can’t. Because Geno is getting better but Sidney really, really isn’t, and he disappears for two or three days at a time, emerging pale and drawn and so distinctly unhappy. Geno thinks about asking a team doctor if depression is a symptom of a concussion or a result of it, but decides it doesn’t really matter.

“Go home,” Geno says eventually, when he has Sidney in his bed and the door locked, the shades pulled down. “Let mother take care of you. I am doing bad job.”

“You’re doing great,” Sidney says with his hand over his eyes. “You’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to do, you’re getting better so you can go home and train hard and come back and lead the team.”

Geno’s stomach drops, and he wants to tug Sidney’s hand down but doesn’t want to hurt him. “You come back, too. Sid, you back next season, don’t be stupid.”

“I don’t know,” Sidney says, his mouth drooping. “Right now I can’t imagine ever coming back.”

“You come back,” Geno says firmly. “I tell you. Future Geno knows, he tell young Sid, so don’t think you don’t come back.”

Sidney’s mouth droops further, and he doesn’t say anything for a while. Geno is about to keep arguing when Sidney says, “I’m staying, I’m not leaving. My parents can come here if they want but I don’t need anyone to take care of me.”

He does, Geno thinks. He needs someone better than Geno.

Geno keeps getting better, and one of the first orders of business is to convince his parents to head home. At first, Mama simply says, “No,” at the same time Papa says, “Okay, Zhenya.” That leads to a screaming match between Mama and Geno that ends in slammed doors in opposite ends of the house and Papa in the middle, as always, sadly watching TV alone in the den.

It takes Denis to pry Mama home, and before she leaves she takes Geno by the chin and says, “That boy.”

“Not your concern,” Geno says, trying to make his eyes as steely as hers. It kind of works, he guesses, because she switches to looking hurt and worried, which would normally kill him. But it’s _Sid._ He’s not going to apologize or talk about Sidney before he’s ready. Sidney’s too important.

He expects to feel a bit lonely after his parents have gone, since his time with the team is still limited to the bit of light conditioning he has to do with Kadar after PT. He is far from returning and has a long offseason of hard training to look forward to and he thinks Sidney envies him that; these are physical steps that Geno can take to coming back, and he wishes he could share them with Sidney, heal him in the same way.

The fact is, Geno is healing and Sidney isn’t and it’s hard. They both miss hockey terribly, but when Geno’s with Sidney he doesn’t miss it quite so much. Even traveling more isn’t so bad, because Sidney is always waiting for him when he gets back, and once that had been a bad thing, annoying or intrusive or something he didn’t really understand. Now, it’s a comfort, especially when Sidney stays over; he can go to sleep knowing that he’s going to stay with Sidney for a while and that feels really, really good.

He wishes he could help Sidney in the same way that Sidney helps him. Sometimes he thinks he does. When they’ve been kissing for a while, and Sidney’s mouth is soft and sweet against his, his skin is always warm and he is relaxed against Geno’s body—they are in the dark and it’s easier in the dark to hear Sidney whisper to him about the future. “You’re going to have a really good season,” Sidney tells him. “You’re going to tear it up and stop traveling for a while. You won’t see me.”

“I see you here,” Geno says, holding Sidney tight, and Sidney smiles at him, almost surprised. “Always see you here. Always with you.” It’s on the tip of his tongue to promise to stay—and he’s never done that for anybody, unwilling to lie—but in the end he only promises to always come back.

But then Sidney has a bad stretch of days, and disappears into the darkness of his own house, and Geno doesn’t know if he is welcome to follow.

He stays in Pittsburgh pretty deep into the offseason, which makes his mother incensed. Sidney is staying to be near his doctors and Geno wants more time with Kadar but really more time with Sidney, feeling brazen with more mobility and unwilling to leave Sidney to wallow alone for the summer.

“But aren’t you bored here?” Sidney asks him when Geno invites himself over one day. Sidney’s still in pajamas, squinting in the sunlight, and Geno doesn’t like that there are days when Sidney won’t even bother to get dressed. It’s out of character and unsettling and makes Geno want to drag him out.

He also doesn’t want to push, though, and this is why he is bad at this. Sidney deserves better and Geno doesn’t really know what he needs.

“All of your friends are back home,” Sidney points out when Geno just brushes him off and starts poking through his kitchen.

“Not _all_ ,” Geno says, gesturing at Sidney. Sidney rolls his eyes.

“Okay, but you can do stuff back home. You can _watch TV._ ”

“Don’t have to watch TV,” Geno says, and when nothing satisfactory turns up in Sidney’s fridge, he closes it and straightens up and considers the only other thing they still really have to pass time. “Can have sex here.”

Sidney squints at him, enough that Geno worries, but all he says is, “You can have sex in Moscow, too.”

Geno thinks about that, because it’s the truth. But the bigger truth is that he doesn’t want to have sex in Moscow, or in Magnitogorsk, or with anyone but Sidney. And that’s a truth he’s going to have to face eventually.

“Don’t want to,” Geno tells him, and he backs Sidney up against his breakfast bar to prove it, to kiss him firmly and tellingly.

They haven’t really done much beyond handjobs and the occasional blowjob. Geno’s knee has been in the way, and his parents, and Sidney’s insistence that they go slow. But he’s curious, and before he leaves for the summer, he wants some of his curiosity sated.

He tells Sidney this and relishes his blush a bit, but Sidney is weirdly matter-of-fact about sex, almost practical. The intimate parts with him usually come after—the way he tends to cling after he comes, or how seriously he takes cleaning Geno up. He mostly just shrugs when Geno brings it up and says, “You can fuck me.” Then he frowns down at Geno’s knee. “Maybe with your fingers? Have you ever done that with a girl?”

Geno hasn’t, and he’s mildly disgruntled about it—he thinks he can fuck Sidney fine with his dick if that’s what Sidney wants. But then Sidney says, “I really like fingering,” and it’s the only admission about sex he’s ever made out loud to Geno, so there’s no way Geno’s not fingering Sidney the next chance he gets.

Sidney sets up the chance pretty simply, stripping his pants off the next time they make out and pressing the lube into Geno’s hands. “Just hold on to that,” Sidney tells him. “I’ll tell you what to do in a—” and the rest is swallowed up by Geno’s insistent mouth, his searching tongue, because Sidney bossing him around is fucking hot and Geno is way past denying that.

They keep making out, biting at each other’s lips with the kind of thrilling freedom that comes from not seeing anyone who would ask questions for a while. Sidney is an objectively good kisser, Geno thinks, compared to a lot of kissing he’s done before. He knows what to do with his tongue and what too much spit is and he thinks Sidney’s even better in that regard than Geno is. But Sidney also seems ridiculously eager for whatever Geno does with him, even though Geno knows some of it can’t be too great and certainly lacks technique and finesse. Geno wants to know Sidney better so he can touch him better, but Sidney likes _everything._

He likes when Geno grabs his ass while they make out, so Geno does that as much as possible, this time one-handed because he’s still holding the lube. Sidney is on top of him on the bed, warm and heavy over him, naked from the waist down and his nipples hard and visible through his white t-shirt, which is almost sexier than if he’d pulled his shirt off. He often seems startled by how much Geno likes to look at him, even though he gets in his fair share of staring back. They still always do this in the dark, but it’s better in the daylight, like now.

Eventually, Sidney is moving his hips and bumping his cock into Geno’s thigh and sighing into his mouth. “Okay,” he says, a little slurred in a way that makes Geno feel impossibly smug. “This will be better if I’m on my back, I think.”

“Like you up here,” Geno purrs, and Sidney tries to look unimpressed, though his flush betrays him. He bites his bottom lip when Geno squeezes his ass, inching his fingers towards the place he’s going to get to touch for the first time, and wiggles into it a bit.

“Next time, if you’re feeling up to it,” Sidney says slowly, deliberately. “I’ll ride you from up here.”

Geno groans and presses his head back into the pillow, and Sidney takes the distraction to flip them, settling onto his back and grabbing another pillow to jam under his hips while Geno stretches out next to him. He is careful with his knee because Sidney is, and because he doesn’t want anything to kill his boner, which throbs with want as Sidney spreads his legs.

“Okay. Got the lube?”

“Yes boss,” Geno says, holding it up and waving it. Sidney grins at him and spreads his legs wider. His thighs are pale and still so strong, shaking a little the more that Geno looks at them, and his cock is hard and thick against his belly, a prettier picture than he should objectively make.

“Good,” Sidney says. He grabs his own cock almost absentmindedly, his eyes tracking Geno’s face avidly. “Okay, start with one finger. Slow.”

This time, Geno understands slow for Sidney, not thinking about the newness of what they’re doing but more the fact that he doesn’t know what he’s doing and doesn’t want to hurt Sidney. He gives him one slick finger as slow as Sidney asks, watching him wiggling into it, leaning around so his wrist has a better angle. When Sidney jerks his cock a few times, quick tugs, and shudders, Geno takes the hint before Sidney chokes out, “Okay, move your—”

He’s never done this with a girl’s ass, though the small noises and shuddery breaths that Sidney is letting out makes him wonder if he should’ve been, if they’d have liked it. Sidney _really_ likes it, true to his word, and Geno fucks one finger out slowly but carefully, firmly, until Sidney is shuddering more and tilting his hips up and saying, “More, another one, you can—”

Geno pulls his finger out to slick another up, placing them carefully at Sidney’s rim and watching in some fascination as his hole twitches in pinked anticipation. “Two?” he says, a little bit to be sure and a little bit to be a dick, and Sidney nods shakily and moans out loud when Geno starts sliding them in.

It’s tight, way tighter than fingering a girl, and hot and strange and _good_ , all at once. Geno takes his hand away from where he’d been lightly stroking the inside of his thigh to stroke his cock, keeping his fingers still as he feels Sidney adjust. He is surprised at the arousal he feels burning deep in his gut, but Sidney looks so fucking hot like this, and it might be the first time he’s seen him come so unraveled before an orgasm. It’s a really attractive sight.

More attractive is the slight edge of bossiness tinged with neediness in Sidney’s voice when he says, “Move, Geno, fuck me.” Geno fucks his fingers in and out, still slow, scissoring them once for the stretch and for the curiosity and doing it again when Sidney shudders all over.

He keeps his rhythm until Sidney jerking himself more urgently, his thighs shaking, and Geno goes a little faster. He goes deeper, not really thinking about it, but Sidney shouts and seizes up and there is sweat broken out across his face, the bridge of his nose and the lower belly Geno can see below his shirt.

“There,” Sidney pants out, and Geno tries to find that spot again, slowing down until Sidney shakes his head frantically and says, “Never mind, just—faster, please—” and Geno obliges. He pulls his fingers out to add more lube, the squelch of it obscene and dirty and making his dick twitch so he has to palm himself again, rubbing and biting down on a groan. He’s so _hard_ , and when the head of Sidney’s cock pops out from his fist it is wet, and Geno stares it in wonder.

“ _Really_ like this.”

“Yes, yeah, please—more.”

“Three fingers?” Geno checks, and Sidney nods quickly, frantic again. He adds a slicked up third finger just as carefully as the first two but Sidney takes it easily, eagerly, and his thighs are shaking hard. Geno rubs at them, rubs right in the soft, thin skin in the crease and fucks his fingers in and out hard and leans in closer to smell Sidney. He smells like clean sweat and like his laundry detergent and musky arousal, and Geno feels hungry for more of it.

He hits that spot again and Sidney cries out again, curling up a little, tilting into Geno’s touch and searching for his fingers. He’s clenching, too, and Geno thinks about asking him if he wants more, if four fingers is even okay, but Sidney seems really into jerking himself and maybe getting off and Geno lets him focus on that, still petting his thighs sometimes and humming against the damp skin of Sidney’s neck.

“Good you like this,” Geno mumbles, and Sidney shudders for him. “So good. Next time I do this, I stretch you good, and you don’t touch cock.”

“ _Geno._ ”

“You get on top of me and you take this instead,” Geno says, shifting to rub his erection against Sidney’s bare, sweaty hip, letting out a stuttering groan when it catches on his skin. “Better then fingers, I think you like.”

“Fuck,” Sidney says, almost a sob, and he bites his lip so hard when he comes that Geno has to lean in and tug it out from under his teeth with his, gently pressing their mouths together.

Geno pulls his fingers out carefully, wiping them on the pillow and kissing the lines of Sidney’s face when he winces. “Good?” he asks, to be sure, even though he knows the answer, and Sidney huffs and reaches down and gets a good handful of his dick, too dry and too quick but still fucking good somehow.

“Wait, here,” Sidney says, wriggling until the lube hits Geno’s stomach. He lets Geno cock go and ignores his protesting groan to shove the pillow out from under him and turn onto his side, ass tucked back into Geno’s crotch. “Use the lube and—go ahead.”

Geno gets it pretty fast and drizzles more lube where Sidney is already slick, wedging his cock right there and thrusting frantically against him. His knee twinges a little, almost a token protest, but Geno ignores it to grunt and shove his way to orgasm, biting at the back of Sidney’s neck because it’s there and because he can, and Sidney reaches back and takes his hand and lets him.

Sidney is a mess when Geno gathers his faculties enough to sit up and lean over to kiss him, covered in come from back to front and not complaining at all. He just kisses Geno sweetly and even lets him handle the cleanup, makeshift with tissues from the bedside table because he doesn’t want to go too far away.

“I really need a shower,” Sidney says, giggling a little, but he crawls into Geno’s arms and stays there, and Geno wraps him up solidly enough to convey how little they’re going to move for the next little while. They settle against each other, and Geno is thinking about how he’d be perfectly happy to never leave this bed, ever, when Sidney says, “Next time,” and then seems to catch himself, hiding his face in Geno’s chest.

“Next time,” Geno says to prompt him, and Sidney sighs a little and slides one hand in between them, brushing it lightly over Geno’s soft cock.

“Next time,” Sidney says lowly. “We’ll do it exactly like you said.”

And Geno shudders and thinks of it, flushes with wanting it, and thinks he might just be able to leave this bed if it means time will pass and next time will be here after that. He thinks he might be able to go to Russia with an encounter like that in his back pocket, with the reassurance that there will be times after that that are the same.

“Yes,” Geno agrees, and hopes next time comes fast.

 

 

When the new season starts, Geno is sure that he’s happier than he’s ever been. He has Sidney, has done so much with Sidney that the weeks they had spent apart in the offseason seem completely inconsequential. He has hockey, and it’s really fucking good hockey, the kind of hockey he’d promised Sidney. And he’s not traveling at all, but that doesn’t even feel like the best part; all it means is that he has more time with Sidney and with the team, more time to build chemistry with James Neal and start racking up points with him.

The only way it could be better is if Sidney were playing with him, and as the season grows a bit older, suddenly that’s more than just a possibility. Sidney comes back against the Islanders, elated, beautiful in his sheer joy, and proves himself to be a force as always. When he gets his first goal back, Geno thinks that he has never loved him more.

But then Sidney is out again, and Geno struggles with that but not as much as Sidney. He disappears again, first heading home which is fine and then shutting himself up in the guest house, which is not fine, and Geno tries to let him know that.

Sidney is stubborn, though, and while he lets Geno in for sex he doesn’t seem to be very into, he doesn’t let them talk about much else. They are back in the dark, and now Geno wants all the lights on, wants to tug Sidney back out onto the ice and just _make_ him be better. It’s incredibly frustrating to know that he can’t.

“Do you think,” Sidney asks, when they’re both in bed and pretending to sleep and the lights have been off for hours. “Do you think maybe you lied to me?”

Geno freezes, anger and wretched, achy sadness warring in the pit of his stomach, and he is afraid to say anything at all.

“I mean, when you told me I would play again. You—you said I was 24 and I was playing hockey and—Geno I’m 24 now and I don’t know if I’m ever—”

“Stop,” Geno says. He wants to cry. He wants to climb on top of Sidney and shake him and yell at him.

He wants to promise Sidney that he’s going to play again, and suddenly he knows that he can do that. Geno sits up and leans over Sidney so that he can look him in the eye, grabs his hands and squeezes hard. “Not lie. I never lie to you. Would not do that.”

“Maybe you—maybe you didn’t want to kill my dream, maybe you just—”

“No, Sid. If I say you play again, then you play again. Promise.” He squeezes Sidney’s hands again. “Not gonna let you give up. Not now, not in past. So stop it.”

“I’m so tired,” Sidney says, and Geno shakes his head and lies down beside him again, gathering him close and kissing his temple.

“So sleep,” Geno says. “I stay with you, make sure you wake up for breakfast. Maybe practice. You keep sleep, keep wake up, over and over until you play again. I promise.”

Sidney lets out a shuddery breath, and grabs at Geno’s hand again. He doesn’t let go even when he falls asleep, fingers loosely folded around Geno’s. And in the morning, he wakes up slowly but completely, eats the breakfast that Geno puts in front of him, and in a small voice agrees to go to practice.

It’s a start, Geno knows. And he knows it’ll be enough eventually.

In the past, Sidney shows him Eddie Shore’s book for the first time, and Geno avoids talking about it with Sidney in the present. He doesn’t even mention to Sidney that he’s traveling again; he wonders if Sidney still wants to fix it, thinks that the Eddie Shore cure would work for him. He hopes not; if even his best hockey is not enough to keep Geno here all the time, Geno can’t imagine that someone else can.

Sidney is the one that brings it up, asking him point blank if he’s started traveling again. “Yes,” Geno sighs, but he’s quick to add, “Only to you, young you. So safe.”

“Not to the Winter Classic?” Sidney asks, and Geno assures him that’s it been months since he’s been there, and the Tampa game too. It’s a relief, though he sometimes has nightmares about it. He doesn’t mention that to Sidney, because he thinks Sidney has the same nightmares.

“You weren’t traveling for a long time,” Sidney says. “And you—you know you’ll stop visiting me in like a year. Have you thought about why?”

Geno shrugs. He doesn’t like to think about a year from now, not when _now_ is going so well. “Don’t know. Maybe I just stop seeing you. I do what I supposed to do, finish assignment.”

“Maybe,” Sidney says thoughtfully, carefully. “Or maybe you stop traveling completely.”

“How?” Geno asks, but he already knows what this is, and already knows it’s going to be an argument. He really doesn’t want to argue with Sidney, doesn’t like doing it the same way he doesn’t like arguing with his mother or with Denis or with Oksana.

“Maybe you find another anchor besides hockey.”

“Can’t,” Geno says firmly, and Sidney looks to be steeling himself, ready to argue this out, and Geno just really, really doesn’t have the patience for that. “And who is anchor, Sid? You?”

Sidney deflates completely, so much that it almost breaks Geno’s heart. The thing of it is, the worst part, is that Geno is pretty sure that if he could have an anchor outside of hockey, it would be Sidney. That maybe it could’ve always been Sidney; if Geno were a factory worker or a painter or a veterinarian instead of a hockey player, that maybe Sidney would be it for him, could be the one that keeps him in the present.

But Geno loves Sidney more than he’s ever loved anybody, and Geno keeps traveling. Sidney isn’t it. And Geno kind of hates that he wants to be. He hates that he can’t stay for Sidney, stay with Sidney always, and that it will always be this way, however long they have together.

“I guess not,” Sidney says, and they drop it for now.

Sidney is seeing a lot of different doctors, some of whom become convinced that he was misdiagnosed, and slowly his hope starts coming back, firmer than Geno could get it to be. He thanks Geno anyway, telling him he wouldn’t have even gone to another doctor if Geno hadn’t made coming back sound like a sure thing, and Geno feels incredulous. Sidney and hockey are so connected, so seamlessly intertwined, that he can’t imagine a world where Sidney isn’t playing until an old and satisfying retirement. It’s not even really a question for Geno, and Sidney doesn’t have to _thank_ him.

“Still,” Sidney says. They’re on the ice, and that’s thrilling, even though Geno really wants to shake Sidney. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yes, I have to,” Geno says, and it occurs to him then that Sidney doesn’t even know what he means to Geno, what his hockey means to Geno, and Geno has no idea how to tell him.

It doesn’t help that in the midst of his return, Sidney keeps picking at the anchor discussion, bringing it up in ways he thinks are casual and subtle and really just piss Geno off. He asks about Oksana, which is the worst, but also about other girls, about _Max_ , which makes Geno laugh hard and harder still at the disgust in Sidney’s voice.

“None of them hockey,” Geno says, and he doesn’t add _none of them as much as you._

He tries, he really does, to explain that to Sidney. When Sidney is playing again, playing with a chip on his shoulder and too much to prove, he gets tired a lot, happily sore, and he goes to Geno’s house after a game to kiss him triumphantly.

 

“Tired?” Geno asks when they’re up in the bedroom, and Sidney nods, flopping back on the bed. There is a purpling bruise visible on his collarbone, not from Geno’s mouth but from a jabbed stick, and he looks beautifully happy.

“Really tired,” Sidney says, and he stretches, legs spreading, t-shirt riding up. “Gonna let you do all the work.”

And Geno collapses onto Sidney, kissing him greedily and hungrily. He strips them both pointedly, because sometimes Sidney doesn’t even bother but Geno likes bare skin, likes when they touch all over and it’s only them. And Sidney lets him, not even moving to help or handing out instructions like he usually does. He’s sticking to his word and Geno can’t love him any more than he does right now.

He wants to tell Sidney that. He sets about fucking him first, though, fingering him until he’s writhing and squirming and sweating again. Sidney smells almost like he did on the ice, when he’d set up Geno on the powerplay and slammed into his arms, held him fast and tight and like he never wanted to let go.

The lights are on. Sidney twitches towards the lamp Geno had tapped on, and Geno grabs his hand and shakes his head and brushes his fingers against his prostate, watching every flick of pleasure play out over Sidney’s face. He fingers Sidney and watches him long past where he’s ready for Geno’s cock, when he’s drawn away from the edge by going lax and sighing more than moaning and whimpering more than crying out. He looks like he’s melted into the sheets and it’s easy as anything when Geno replaces his fingers with his dick.

It stays easy, Sidney loose and slack, one hand loose on his cock and only really stroking himself when Geno hits his prostate. When he comes, it’s with a broken whimper, those high, “Ah, ah,” sounds that Geno loves, and he lets Geno keep fucking him, hissing with it and clenching weakly but never flinching away.

Geno loves him, and it feels big when he comes, when he stares at Sidney sweaty and sweet with the lights on, Sidney easy for him and playing hockey again. It feels too big not to say, and so he says it, louder than a whisper, soft and hushed so Sidney knows he means it.

Sidney looks half asleep already, but his eyes flip all the way open when Geno says it, going wide and then, inexplicably sad. It’s enough for Geno to try to get closer to him, to lean down and brush his sweaty curls out of his face and then repeat the words in the pocket of warm air between them.

“I love you,” Geno says, in English and then in Russian. Sidney bites his bottom lip in the way that makes Geno want to kiss him. He lets Sidney talk instead.

“I love you too,” Sidney says slowly, and Geno flushes warm, pleased and not surprised but validated, maybe. “But—I don’t understand.”

“What?” Geno asks, frowning. Sidney frowns back.

“If you love me, why can’t I be your anchor?”

And Geno wishes he had any answer for Sidney other than the truth, which is that he’s not hockey.

 

 

Sidney starts pulling away slowly in the present, as young Sidney keeps arguing with Geno in the past. At first, it’s hard to notice; the playoffs are just around the corner and everyone is focused on that. Sidney still has that chip on his shoulder and it’s almost worrying to Geno, but more worrying is how little he sees of Sidney off the ice, and how everything feels very fragile right now, easily breakable.

Then they are in the thick of the first round and the shitshow that is playing the Flyers, and hockey is the only thing to worry about. And when it’s over, when the dust settles and their season is over too early, it’s almost a relief to sit down with Sidney and confirm his suspicions: Sidney had been pulling away for a reason.

“We should see other people in the offseason,” Sidney tells him firmly. Geno tries not to grind his teeth too much but he really hates the thought, and Sidney might know that because his face is softening a bit. “I think it’ll be good for you.”

“Why?” Geno bites out, and Sidney sighs, shaking his head.

“Because maybe you’ll meet your—”

“Not gonna find an anchor, Sid! Is not possible.”

“You don’t know that,” Sidney tells him. He’s so fucking stubborn, and Geno hates that he loves that so much.

“Yes. I know. Is my life, I know, know for years. Can’t have two anchors, can’t have hockey and—”

“But you never chose hockey!” Sidney says. Geno groans harshly. “You were just a kid, that’s not how soulmates are supposed to work. It’s supposed to be a thing you accept.”

“I accept, accept long time ago. I choose.”

“There’s no way you could’ve made that choice that young,” Sidney says, and though Geno opens his mouth to keep arguing, Sidney cuts him off quickly. “No. Remember when you wouldn’t let me give up? I won’t let you give up, either.”

It seems so pointless and unnecessary. For once, he can already tell the future: he will just end up back here with Sidney, because he doesn’t ever really want to leave him. But Sidney is immovable, refuses to give, and when he kisses Geno goodbye for the summer, he is sad and resolute.

“If it can’t be me, I want it to be someone else,” Sidney says. He looks like Geno’s broken his heart, and Geno thinks that’s really not fair.

There is no one else, as far as Geno’s concerned. It’s jarring to think of how his world has narrowed down to Sidney in these past few years, that outside of him his friends and family seem almost incomplete now. He misses Sidney more than he ever has before, and seeing him in the past, seeing him young and hopeful and not yet loved the way Geno loves him doesn’t help.

He cheats, though. He makes sure to do that. And not just because he knows he’s meant to, but because Sidney is important, and making sure that Sidney knows that his future has hockey and will have hockey for a long time might be the most important thing. Without hockey, Geno wouldn’t have Sidney.

In the present, Geno mopes around at home and then mopes around Moscow when his parents get sick of him. Mama hasn’t mentioned _that boy_ but she must know, has to know, and Geno thinks he must be really bad if she isn’t trying to talk about it.

He texts Sidney plaintively a few times, defiantly ignoring Sidney’s instructions to be with anyone else, but he breaks that resolution decisively when Sidney texts him _I’m seeing someone btw._ He doesn’t give any details, which is probably good since Geno thinks seriously about flying to LA or to Nova Scotia or wherever the fuck and doing something really stupid.

Instead, he gets drunk with Sergei, laughed at by Sergei because he won’t explain what’s wrong, and then he winds up having sex with more women in a week than he has in the past three years combined. Only Kadar’s arrival keeps Geno from going for some kind of record; Kadar picks up on what’s happening pretty quickly and tells him, “Look man, I’m sure you’ll still be able to play hockey if your dick falls off, but that’s really not a theory I’d like to test.”

Geno concedes the point, especially when Sergei tells on him to his mother and she flies to Moscow in a rage, yelling at him in front of Kadar and everything. It’s definitely a low point, and Geno promises everyone that he’s going to focus on training now, focus on _hockey_ , which is the only thing he should be focusing on.

The lockout is almost bittersweet. The chance to play with Sergei again, and to play with Metallurg again rejuvenates him. This is home and it’s important and he may not have forgotten that over the years, but maybe he hasn’t quite always remembered it so completely.

It’s a good distraction from Sidney, and time is good for that, too. Geno is traveling a lot, not just to Sidney now but to other places, sometimes dangerous places and sometimes just to hockey, and it’s a lot like his life before Pittsburgh, before Sidney Crosby. It feels good to be with his family and friends all the time, and he has enough time with them that they do not feel incomplete anymore. They are enough.

Pittsburgh and Sidney are _more_ , and the longer he stays in Magnitogorsk, the more they start to feel like a dream he’d woken up from. _Geno_ feels like a dream, and there is a day when he blinks and nobody has called him anything but Zhenya for months, and Geno seems like a stupid name anyway.

He thinks that it could’ve been like this all along. He could’ve chosen to stay here for his whole career, could’ve never left and never met Sidney as a teammate and maybe his whole life would be different. Maybe he would be more okay with enough. Maybe he could find someone who would be okay with him leaving all the time, okay with risking his genes for their children; maybe it would’ve been a good Russian girl to make Mama happy.

And then Sidney texts him _congrats on the k_ , his first text in weeks, and he’s—he’s Geno. It’s a stupid name but that’s who he is. All of it happened, all of it was real and it happened to him and it was always meant to, and no matter what hurts, there isn’t a thing he would change about it.

_Thank you_ Geno texts back carefully. _Just for now. Miss real captain back home._

Sidney calls him a second later, his voice shaky and unsure. “Geno?” he asks, like it would be anyone else, and when Geno chokes out, “Yes, Sid,” he lets out a long, heavy breath.

“You’re coming back,” Sidney says, and Geno laughs a little, shaking his head.

“I always come back,” Geno says, and it’s on the tip of his tongue to promise to stay, but. Not yet. He can’t promise that yet because he’s never lied to Sidney, and he won’t start now.

“I know,” Sidney tells him, and when he says, “That’s why I’m always waiting,” Geno feels homesick in a place he has never felt homesick before.

 

 

There is very little time between when he gets the call that the lockout is over and he has to get on a plane back to Pittsburgh. There is just enough, though, that Geno forces himself to sit down his family—Mama, Papa and Denis—and carefully, clearly tell them, “I’m in love with someone and it’s a man. I need to know if you can accept that someday.”

Mama starts crying pretty quickly, which is startling and awful, and Papa can’t look at him. Denis groans and puts his head in his hands and says, “Zhenya, why do you always have to make such a mess of things?”

Geno shrugs. “I’m not going to say sorry.”

“Of course you’re not,” Denis says, and he sounds pissed and frustrated but not devastated, at least. Mama, though—she is sobbing, and Geno feels like he did when he was six and came back from his first visit with his grandmother, who was a young woman and gave him a blanket and told him how different his life was going to be. Mama had cried then, too.

He wants to say sorry to Mama, if only because he hates to hurt her. But he meant it when he said he wouldn’t; he can’t apologize for this, because that would mean he already regrets it. And he can’t regret who he is, not if it’s what brings him to Sidney.

“Does this mean you’re not coming back?” Papa asks him quietly, his jaw twitching with the effort to keep judgment from coloring his voice. Geno frowns at him, shaking his head.

“Of course I’m coming back. I’ll always—I’ll come back if you’ll have me.”

“My boy,” Mama says, sniffling valiantly, reaching out to take his hand. Geno tries not to show how shocked he is, but he grips her hand very tight. “Idiot boy. It’ll be so hard for you.”

“When has my life ever been easy?” Geno asks, choked up, and Denis groans again. But he stands up and puts his hand on Geno’s shoulder, and Papa takes his other hand, and just when Geno thinks that maybe they should all hug, they let him go. Mama stops crying, wipes at her face and calls him an idiot three more times, and it’s _almost_ normal, almost like nothing’s changed.

“It’ll take some time,” is Denis’ assessment later, when he’s walking Geno out to his car and helping him load his bags. “But you’re not dying or dead, so that’s a good thing. Always so much drama with you, why don’t you go win another Stanley Cup with your boyfriend so you’ll get even _more_ attention?”

“I love you,” Geno says, and Denis crushes him into a hug, hard and lingering.

“I’m the biggest idiot because I love you too,” Denis says.

 

 

Being back with Sidney is wonderful and difficult. It’s difficult because Geno wants to stay, can sometimes trick himself into believing he’ll stay, but he doesn’t.

He’s traveling all through the past. One night, he watches Eddie Shore crush Ace Bailey and end his career. On another, he sees Sidney scoring his first ever shootout goal against Montreal, the first ever shootout win for the Penguins.

The constants are hockey and Sidney, ping-ponging between them, and Geno thinks he could live with those constants for the rest of his life. At first, Sidney isn’t satisfied with that; he thinks Geno should be hunting down the mythical soulmate, the anchor he missed out on because of hockey, but Geno manages to shut that down.

“Don’t want soulmate if it’s not you,” Geno tells him, and that shuts Sidney up, makes his eyes swim a bit. He hides his face in Geno’s neck and holds on to him tightly, and Geno holds on right back.

Eventually, it’s enough for Sidney that Geno truly believes that, at least. It’s enough that he wants to stay, that he plans to do everything in his power make sure that all the time he has in the present playing hockey is playing hockey with Sidney, building a life with Sidney, a home.

He visits young Sidney for the last time the day before he is meant to sign his new contract with the Penguins. This is the contract that says he will surely finish his career with the Penguins, that he will _stay_ even if he has to leave sometimes. Geno wants to cheat, wants to reassure young Sidney that everything will be okay. But he doesn’t know that for sure, can’t reassure older Sidney completely either, so he asks him to hope instead. Really, hope is all that anybody has. There’s a reason they weren’t supposed to cheat.

The contract is signed very early on July first. Geno had turned off Sidney’s alarm on purpose and left him sleeping, and he plans on crawling right back into bed with him and catching a few more hours. They had been up late with the team celebrating the contract, celebrating Duper and Kuni and Tanger’s deals, and Geno is yawning when he lets himself back into his house.

He is still yawning when his clothes disappear, and he smells water before anything else. At first, Geno thinks he’s in the boathouse again, but when he turns to look he’s outside, facing an enormous house right on the lake. The sun is bright and warm; it feels like summer, wherever he is.

Before Geno can move, can look for cover and safety like normal, the door to the huge house bangs open and a young girl, five or six, comes streaking out. She is trailed by curls and high-pitched giggles and then a man, tall and balding and chasing her, and they both freeze when they look up and see Geno.

Geno freezes, too, because he is staring at his own face, older but starkly familiar.

“Papa!” the girl shouts, covering her eyes. “You’re _naked._ ”

“Go inside, sweetheart,” Geno’s older self says, pushing her gently back towards the door. “We will play again in little while.”

“But—”

“Please.”

“Fine,” the girl grumbles, and she goes back inside with her eyes still covered, bumping into the door at first before pulling it open and stumbling through it.

“Sorry,” older Geno says and switching to Russian, grimacing a little. “I couldn’t quite remember the right date. Hard to pinpoint, or I would’ve been prepared for you.”

“How is this possible?” Geno asks, trembling a little. He’s not cold for once, but he is terrified. “How can I go to the future? I’ve never been to the future.”

“And you never will again,” older Geno says solemnly. He smiles a little. “I don’t know why it happened so don’t ask me. I just know that it did, and it’s the last time, so you’d better make it count.”

Geno swallows hard, and decides quickly to stop asking how. How doesn’t really matter. “Is she—she’s mine?”

“Yes,” older Geno tells him gently, and his smile is huge and proud. “Ours.”

He wants to ask how again, but then he thinks to ask, “Where, and who—”

“Oh come on,” older Geno says, shaking his head. “Stop asking me easy ones. You already know who. And you know where we are. You had this in your head the second you signed that contract.”

“And it’s real?” Geno asks, shaking again but now from wanting it. “It’ll really happen?”

Older Geno shrugs, his eyes sparkling. “Yes. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Why don’t you wait and see?”

Geno closes his eyes to suck in a choked breath, and when he opens them he’s back in his house, where Sidney is asleep and waiting for him. He’s still shaky climbing into bed, the smell of the lake and the shadow of the big house clinging to his senses, and he’s still wondering if it was real when Sidney stirs and leans back into him.

“Where’d you go?” Sidney mumbles, and looking at him—hair mussed from sleep, still drooling too much from his new teeth, curled into Geno’s arms already like he’d been waiting for him even unconsciously—Geno decides to stop wondering.

“The future,” Geno says, dropping a quick kiss onto Sidney’s forehead. “Was great. You gonna love it.”

“Mm,” Sidney says, not quite awake or understanding. That’s fine; Geno doesn’t want to spoil the surprise.

“Yes. Go back to sleep, I’m home now.”

Sidney goes back to sleep, and Geno follows him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cut a lot out of this fic and will probably throw up a post with deleted scenes, references and things like that, once real life calms down a bit. Thanks for reading!


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